CHUTZPAH, THY NAME IS NEW YORK TIMES: Times: Epstein Suicide Conspiracy Theories Show How Our Information System is Poisoned. This is the same New York Times that, just for example, completely misreported the Trayvon Martin case (going so far as to deem George Zimmerman a “white Hispanic” to further its narrative, a phrase the Times never otherwise used) and was the leader of the lynch mob over phony rape allegations against the Duke lacrosse team. Just last week oped columnist Michelle Goldberg reiterated the myth that Trump called neo-Nazis “very fine people.” But it’s the rest of the “information system” that’s poisoned. Physician, heal thyself.
Archive for 2019
August 12, 2019
MAKES SENSE: STUDY: Men who recycle more likely to have their sexuality questioned. “The professors also noted in their study that men were less likely to view women who participated in masculine pro-environmental behaviors favorably, whereas the opposite did not hold true.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Jeffrey Epstein Totally Gets Vince Fostered.
Ever since the news broke on Saturday morning that convicted sex offender and potential Clinton embarrassment Jeffrey Epstein was found “suicided” in his jail cell the internet has been positively ablaze with weirdness.
Epstein may have been the most well-connected dangerous perv in history. The guy knew everybody. Presidents. Princes. Businessmen. Maybe even Oprah.
A guy with an acquaintances list like that can’t suddenly expire while incarcerated without speculation bombs exploding all over the place.
The whole thing stinks.
BRITISH LAW ENFORCEMENT PRIORITIES: Police warn people mocking convicted drug dealer’s hairstyle they could be prosecuted.
CHINA: Debts coming due.
…major protests began in 2014 when China imposed restrictions on who could get elected to the Hong Kong government. China was seen as trying to ensure than only pro-China people were running Hong Kong and that was not popular with the locals.
The government is currently waiting out the protestors and refusing to meet any of their demands. Even the extradition law is still waiting to be revived, rather than completely withdrawn as protestors demanded. The current cycle of protests began on June 4th when Hong Kong was the only place in China were large groups could gather to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Hong Kong is the only place in China where you can do a lot of things.
Read the entire assessment.
RELATED: China’s Great Oppressor reality subverts its great power aspirations.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Has College Gotten Too Easy? Yes, yes it has.
HARD LEFT TURN IN THE EASTERN PACIFIC: The aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and its escorts turn in formation.
GOOD LUCK: I Tried Hiding From Silicon Valley in a Pile of Privacy Gadgets.
I had decades of digital exhaust to clean up. “Your data across different companies is being pulled together by data brokers and ad companies. If the government asked for it and spent some time correlating, it probably wouldn’t be that far off from what the Chinese government has,” says Rob Shavell, the co-founder of Abine Inc., a company in Cambridge, Mass. I signed up for Abine’s DeleteMe service, paying $129 a year for it to opt me out from databases run by brokers that sell my personally identifiable information. I gave DeleteMe all my current and previous home addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses, and it removed me from 33 public-records crawlers—database services with names like Intelius and Spokeo, plus a whole lot of yellow pages.
Pierre Valade, a French graduate of Stanford’s design school living in New York, designed the Jumbo app for the iPhone in April. I gave it permission to access my Twitter, Google, and Alexa accounts, and a cute cartoon elephant (he’s got a bad memory, unlike Big Tech) got to work scrubbing away my past. In 10 minutes, all my tweets older than a month vanished, as did all my Google searches and Alexa requests. Jumbo also adjusted more than 40 Facebook settings to protect my privacy, something I would’ve had to spend several hours figuring out. “Even me, on Facebook to design that feature, I got bored. It’s too much work,” Valade says. He’s trying to get Facebook Inc. to allow Jumbo users to erase their timelines all at once, but the company won’t give him the API to do that. “Do they have two PR strategies? One where they say to Congress and the Washington Post, ‘We’re good guys,’ and another where they’re not helping us build what we want?” he asks me. I don’t have an answer, because I’m avoiding Facebook. Also, because it didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Before I asked people which gadgets to buy, I had to make sure my digital trail was private and secure. I switched to the ad-blocking, non-data-recording Brave browser (headquartered, unfortunately, in San Francisco and, worse yet, run by Palo Alto native Brendan Eich, who co-founded Mozilla Corp. and created the JavaScript coding language). I abandoned Google, using the DuckDuckGo search engine from outside of Philadelphia because it doesn’t track me or customize my search results. I also started communicating via Signal, a free app that encrypts both ends of text and voice messages. I was surprised by how many messages I was glad to hide from posterity: one about a former co-worker who’s a drunk; another from someone who wanted to be expunged from my upcoming book. Then I realized that Signal is located in Mountain View, Calif.
So much more at the link, it’s disturbing.
FLASHBACK: Hotel Googlefornia. “Hill did literally everything an internet-connected human being can do to disconnect themselves from Google. But you don’t have to be a Google customer in order to have the company garner 100,000 little bits of data about you every single week. Or as Hill herself says, ‘Google, like Amazon, is woven deeply into the infrastructure of online services and other companies’ offerings, which is frustrating to all the connected devices in my house’.”
CHANGE: J.D. Vance Becomes Catholic.
THAT SOUNDS ABOUT RIGHT: Book: ‘Collusion hoax’ a Clinton-Obama payback for 2016 loss to Trump.
The book is Andrew McCarthy’s Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency.
And in fact, the campaign history Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign explains how the Russia collusion narrative was made up to explain Hillary’s loss.
THE SUPER-BRIGHT LED FLASHLIGHTS have gone from really expensive to amazingly cheap.
NO COINCIDENCE THAT WESTERN CIVILIZATION PRODUCED THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION: Scan a who’s who of Europe’s explosion of scientific inquiry and it becomes clear that two factors united them: Their location and their faith.
So, if Western Civ and Christianity are lost, can science be far behind? Or, to put it another way, can science survive multiculturalism and identity politics, which are antithetical to Christianity’s enduring emphasis on the individual?
REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS: In France, Even Muslims Have Had It With Radical Muslims. “When you reach a certain critical mass, integration becomes impossible. It isn’t even desirable any more for any of the parties in question. We may already be there.”
YEAH, PRETTY MUCH: Making Big Law Partner Is Like ‘Winning A Pie-Eating Contest In Which The Prize Is More Pie.’
I noticed that when I was practicing law. I would look at the partners and think wow, the brass ring is I get to be them. Not so appealing.
One partner in my firm, a very nice guy but a total workaholic, was shocked when his five-year-old was asked to draw a picture of his family in kindergarten, and left him (the dad) out of it. He took a year’s leave after that.
But the “star system” pay scheme described here is short-term wise, long-term foolish. As my friend and colleague Ben Barton’s research has shown, long-term the firms with near-lockstep compensation do better. The ones based on free agency are staffed with people who have no loyalty, and foster an atmosphere that repels associates.
BUT THE IMPORTANT PART IS TO STIGMATIZE AND DE-NORMALIZE GUN PURCHASES: California’s Background Check Law Had No Impact on Gun Deaths, Johns Hopkins Study Finds. And gun purchasers.
