MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Google needs a new CEO, but dumping Sundar Pichai is not enough. “When a gigantic corporation that controls our data and knows us intimately takes a controversial political stance, it ought to make us worry.”
Archive for 2017
August 14, 2017
AT AMAZON, deals in Automotive Tools and Equipment.
THEY LEARNED IT BY READING YOU, GRAY LADY: Amateur Sleuths Aim to Identify Charlottesville Marchers, but Sometimes Misfire, the New York Times reports:
After a day of work at the Engineering Research Center at the University of Arkansas, Kyle Quinn had a pleasant Friday night in Bentonville with his wife and a colleague. They explored an art exhibition at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and dined at an upscale restaurant.
Then on Saturday, he discovered that social media sleuths had incorrectly identified him as a participant in a white nationalist rally some 1,100 miles away in Charlottesville, Va. Overnight, thousands of strangers across the country had been working together to share photographs of the men bearing Tiki torches on the University of Virginia campus. They wanted to name and shame them to their employers, friends and neighbors. In a few cases, they succeeded.
* * * * * * * *
Mr. Quinn, who runs a laboratory dedicated to wound-healing research, was quickly flooded with vulgar messages on Twitter and Instagram, he said in an interview on Monday. Countless people he had never met demanded he lose his job, accused him of racism and posted his home address on social networks.
Fearing for their safety, he and his wife stayed with a colleague this weekend.
“You have celebrities and hundreds of people doing no research online, not checking facts,” he said. “I’ve dedicated my life to helping all people, trying to improve health care and train the next generation of scientists, and this is potentially throwing a wrench in that.”
For someone whose only sin was a passing resemblance to someone else — the actual man in the Charlottesville photo has not been conclusively identified — Mr. Quinn bore the direct consequences of the reckless spread of misinformation in breaking news, a common ritual in modern news events.
Flashback: New York Times Publishes [Ferguson policeman] Darren Wilson’s Address.
—Ed Driscoll.com, November 25, 2014. And of course, this past fourth of July, CNN doxxed an Internet gif maker for kicks and grins. Or as they say at BuzzFeed, “What time does Justine land?”
Classical allusion in headline.
‘BECAUSE YOU THINK YOU’RE A MAN!’ Video: Woman loses collective shiznit on cops outside Trump Tower.
Related: Republicans to Trump: American Elections Are Not Rigged, You Must Accept the Outcome.
—Hillary Clinton.com, October 20, 2016.
FLOWERS IN THEIR HAIR: REMEMBER THE SUMMER OF LOVE? NO? Lucky you, Andrew Ferguson writes on location at Haight-Ashbury:
When the tour was over I walked back downtown to the library to take a last look at the exhibits there. I saw something I’d missed in my first walk through. There was another thing absent from all the celebrations: They were neglecting the people who lived in the Haight before the Summer of Love, before the freaks arrived and the world changed. But here they were, in the basement of the library. At the end of the exhibit there’s a single display case, labeled “The Rest of Us,” as a reminder that not every San Franciscan participated in the Summer of Love.
They are photos from the mid-sixties. One shows a beauty shop, beehived women lined up for their weekly rinse; another is a family picture of a wedding party, fading with that washed-out color you find in sixties Polaroids. In another a line of middle-school cheerleaders smiles brightly, and there are a few men in suits and ties. They all look so odd — odder to the eye than the surrounding pictures of dancing hippies — and not simply because they’re antiques a half-century old. They look odd because, with the smiles and the attitude of self-assurance and contentment, they look clueless. We know something they don’t know. They don’t know what’s about to hit them.
When Alfred Hitchcock was shooting Vertigo on location in San Francisco in the fall of 1957, he thought he was making a sexually-charged psychological thriller. What he actually produced was a time capsule of city about to be utterly transformed by forces just as powerful and destructive in their own way as the 1906 earthquake – and whose effects have been infinitely more long-lasting.
NPR ADDRESSES THE IMPORTANT QUESTION OF WHICH TEETH-WHITENER IS BEST.
AND YOU THOUGHT THE GEO-SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Scientists discover new tectonic plate.
ROBERT MCMANUS: Avoidable Mayhem: Why did Virginia’s political leadership order the police and National Guard to stand down?
Details remain thin. It is not clear, for example, how many alt-right demonstrators were there, though many reports indicate that they were substantially outnumbered by counter-demonstrators, largely drawn from the same crowd that has been rioting at the drop of Donald Trump’s name since November 9.
So, obviously, this was a fraught moment. But what would have been the outcome had the police and the Virginia National Guard—both on hand in strong numbers—done their duty, enforced properly obtained demonstration permits, and preserved the right of the warring parties to make their respective points without being physically attacked, one by the other and vice versa? It’s worth remembering that Charlottesville did everything it could to prevent the demonstrations, issuing permits only after being sued by the ACLU. And when push came to shove—literally—on Saturday, police and National Guardsmen were to be found only on the periphery of the brawling. Indeed, the Virginia ACLU reported that police were refusing to intervene unless specifically ordered to do so.
“There was no police presence,” Brittany Caine-Conley, a minister-in-training at Charlottesville’s Sojourners United Church of Christ, told the New York Times. “We were watching people punch each other; people were bleeding all the while police were inside of barricades at the park, watching. It was essentially just brawling on the street and community members trying to protect each other.”
Almost at first contact, Charlottesville mayor Michael Signer and Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency and cancelled the demonstrators’ permits, whereupon police began funneling the alt-right protestors away from the designated demonstration site—and, some reports have it, toward the counter-protestors. The carnage followed in short order. Whether the breakdown in police protection was purposeful—that is, intended to quash a constitutionally protected demonstration and provoke a violent confrontation—is a question unlikely to be pursued in Virginia’s present political environment. As partisan eye-gougers go, Governor McAuliffe, a Democrat, is near the top of the list; Mayor Signer, also a Democrat, seems to be cut from the same cloth.
But deliberate or not, the effect was the same: when the sun went down over Charlottesville Saturday, the First Amendment was lying in the dust, and the civic ties meant to bind all Americans were just that much weaker.
I hope the Justice Department will investigate this.
TO PARAPHRASE JOLIET JAKE, I HATE ILLINOIS NATIONAL SOCIALISTS – AND INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISTS: Charlie Martin thinks the media’s real aim is that “they won’t be satisfied until Trump blames the Illinois Nazis and just the Illinois Nazis, and leaves Antifa completely out of it. Which, of course, is excusing Antifa. So far Trump is refusing. I hope he continues.”
Indeed.
WELL, SCOTT ADAMS IS A MASTER PERSUADER. THEY ARE NOT. Dilbert Cartoon on Climate Change Prompts Rebuttal from Yale. “A communications group at Yale University has put out a video (see below) that seems to be a rebuttal to a Dilbert cartoon by Scott Adams poking fun at climate scientists and their misplaced confidence in models. The video is full of impressive-looking scientists talking about charts and data and whatnot. It probably cost a lot to make and certainly involved a lot of time and effort. The most amazing thing, however, is that it actually proves the points being made in the Dilbert cartoon. Rather than debunking the cartoon, the scientists acted it out in slow motion.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The science behind sexbot creation.
CBS’S NORAH O’DONNELL EXCLUDES 9/11 TO CLAIM THREE TIMES AS MANY ‘RIGHT WING’ TERROR ATTACKS.
No doubt, Lucy Ramirez assisted O’Donnell in collating these numbers.
IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? New study says drinking beer leads to mental clarity.
The science is settled.
ANDREW KLAVAN ON WHITE SUPREMACISTS: “Any movement that burns tiki torches but doesn’t serve Mai-Tais is clearly on the wrong track.”
He’s just getting started — watch the whole thing.
THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: With Zika season here, spread via sex is new danger.
BRENDAN O’NEILL ON ‘THE NARCISSISM OF SMALL DIFFERENCES:’ “It’s becoming so clear now why the war of words between SJWs and the new white nationalists is so intense. It isn’t because they have huge ideological differences — it’s because they have so much in common.”
It’s a fairly short, but spot-on Facebook post. Read the whole thing.
FUNNY COMING FROM A SENATOR WHO JUST VOTED AGAINST REPLACING IT: McCain Says ‘I Still Believe’ Obamacare Can be Replaced; ‘I Believe We Must.’