Archive for 2019
November 6, 2019
YOU CAN’T WIN IF YOU DON’T PLAY: GOP Slammed Fairfax County Sheriff Over ICE Policy But Didn’t Run a Candidate Against Her.
TAMARA KEEL: Review: Naroh Arms N1.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Lefty Pundits to Democratic Presidential Field: ‘You’re Losers!’ “What is it that lefty pundits can see that Democratic presidential candidates — with all their highly-paid teams of election experts — can’t? How to win an election, apparently.”
I promise I’m not getting cocky.
A SOUPÇON OF SANITY IN SEATTLE? Far-left candidates appear to flop in Seattle city council race after Amazon dumps dollars.
Related: Washington voters narrowly rejecting affirmative action in Referendum 88.
NOT A GOOD LOOK FOR TIM COOK: Apple and TikTok skipped a Senate hearing on Big Tech and China, and empty seats show lawmakers aren’t pleased.
The missing tech execs were given the “empty seat treatment,” according to Politico reporter Cristiano Lima, with their names prominently displayed on the vacant table and chair reserved for them.
Senator Josh Hawley has been one of the biggest critics of TikTok and of Big Tech in general, and he tweeted his disapproval at the companies that skipped the hearing.
Concerns about major tech companies’ connections to China have grown in the past year. Short video app TikTok, which has been download over 1 billion times, in particular has been scrutinized for allegedly censoring content that could anger the Chinese government. In September, The Guardian reported on internal TikTok documents instructing the moderators to censor politically fraught topics including Tiananmen Square and an independent Tibet. The company said that these guidelines were no longer in use, and that the Chinese government has no control over them, because the app does not operate in China.
Then why not testify that to Congress?
CHINA SYNDROME: Vast Dragnet Targets Theft of Biomedical Secrets for China. “Nearly 200 investigations are underway at major academic centers. Critics fear that researchers of Chinese descent are being unfairly targeted.” Well, the Chinese government expects overseas Chinese to be loyal to it, so . . . .
BIG LABOR, BIG LOSS: Jury Rules Against ILWU in Portland Container Terminal Case.
After more than seven years of civil litigation, a federal jury has ruled that a dispute over which union got to plug and unplug reefer containers was a substantial part of the reason that the port of Portland, Oregon lost all of its containerized ocean freight services.
In a judgement entered in part on Monday, the jury ruled that alleged unlawful labor practices by the International Longshore Workers’ Union and its Local 8 were a substantial factor in causing $94 million in damage to Portland’s container terminal operator, ICTSI, which pulled out of its contract with the port in 2017.
The National Labor Relations Board previously determined that the ILWU had organized slowdowns at ICTSI’s Portland terminal in order to force the Port of Portland to give longshoremen the work of plugging and unplugging reefers – a task normally assigned to the Port’s union electricians, IBEW Local 48.
This kind of work-rules crap went a long way towards putting American carmakers into their longterm decline.
THE 2010s HAVE BROKEN OUR SENSE OF TIME: That’s the headline of a recent BuzzFeed article. James Lileks disagrees:
Without knowing history, facts, names, events, trends, concerns, panics, morals, tropes, and all the other shared threads of an era, you can’t understand what produced the thing you’re now claiming to have the right to reuse. If you can’t make sense of your current era, it’s because you don’t have the ability to make sense of any era, and hence don’t know how this all works in the flow of the last 100 years of the culture.
5. Most young generations have been cheerfully unconcerned with what came before, for the most part, because to be young is to be certain your time is the most important evah. But previous generations had time to sift and judge the products of their own time, because the pace of innovation and information was much mroe leisurely. Today everyone faces a firehose of content from waking to sleeping, if they’re Very Online, and mistakes their ability not to drown with understanding where the water comes from, and why, and what it all means. It’s like surviving waterboarding and concluding you’re amphibious.
6. And so on, and so on, unto the grave, etc.
Read the whole thing.
BLUE ON BLUE: Steyer staffer quits after accessing Harris data in South Carolina. “The Steyer campaign announced the resignation of Dwane Sims, the campaign’s deputy South Carolina state director, after initially placing him on administrative leave over the weekend. Sims previously worked for the South Carolina Democratic Party as a voter file manager with access to campaigns’ proprietary data.”
To what end? What benefit was the going-nowhere Steyer campaign going to get from the all-but-over Harris campaign?
SIGNS OF A SICK POLITY:
ON THIS DAY 80 YEARS AGO, NAZI GERMANY BEGINS ‘SONDERAKTION KRAKOW’: Sonderaktion Krakau was the codename for a Nazi German operation against professors and academics of the Jagiellonian University and other universities in Nazi occupied Kraków, Poland, at the beginning of World War II. It was carried out as part of the much broader action plan, the Intelligenzaktion, to eradicate the Polish intellectual elite especially in those centres (such as Kraków) that were slated by the Nazis to become culturally German.
VIRGINIA CLOWN SHOW UPDATE: Virginia Democrats Faced No GOP Challenger in 25 Percent of State Senate Races.
AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense.
I LIKE THE CUT OF HIS JIB: Rep. Devin Nunes Says GOP Will Call Adam Schiff As First Witness In Impeachment Inquiry.
FASTER, PLEASE: Phage Therapy Could Beat Drug-Resistant Illnesses. People have been talking about this my whole life. Maybe one day it will happen.
VIRGINIA CLOWN SHOW UPDATE: Virginia lawmaker jailed for teen sex scandal wins state Senate seat.
BATTLESWARM BLOG: Interview With Tenured Columbia Professor Who Resigned Over SJW Policy. “Serban escaped communist-dominated Romania, and he says that Columbia is ‘some sort of socialist left, on its way toward full-blown communism’.”
YEAH, BUT PARENTS LOVE IT BECAUSE IT KEEPS THEM QUIET: Too much screen time may slow toddlers’ brain development.
In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal Facebook tightened its rules on what personal data app developers could access. Following broad changes made in 2018, app developers’ access to groups was restricted to content, as opposed to the data of individuals belonging to those groups such as names and profile pictures.
In a blog published on Tuesday Facebook’s director of platform partnerships Konstantinos Papamiltiadis admitted this new rule hadn’t been uniformly implemented. Roughly 100 app developers retained access to group members’ personal data, although Papamiltiadis said Facebook has now cut them off.
Papamiltiadis said there was “no evidence of abuse,” but that at least 11 of these developers accessed the data in the last 60 days. Facebook is asking them to delete all relevant data.
He didn’t name any of the apps, but said they were “primarily social media management and video streaming apps, designed to make it easier for group admins to manage their groups more effectively and help members share videos to their groups.” He was also unspecific on exactly what personal data was accessed.
In that case, the safe bet is “lots.”
YOU KNOW IT’S TRUE:
“MAYBE THEY CAN GET A JOB AT DEADSPIN.”
If Joe Biden had been smart enough to run as, essentially, a Bill Clinton Democrat, he’d have the nomination sewed up and be a real threat in the general. But Democrats apparently think Twitter is the electorate.
