VERY MERRY DEALS are here. #CommissionEarned
Archive for 2022
December 17, 2022
I’m so old, I can remember when Twitter suspended an entire newspaper in October of 2020: Jack Dorsey says the New York Post Twitter account will remain locked until it deletes the original tweet featuring its Hunter Biden story.
ACCOUNTANTS ARE BAD AT WARTIME MATH: “We’ve discussed the West’s almost criminally neglected stockpiles – unready for anything but the most limited or short war – for the better part of two decades. The Russo-Ukrainian War has once again brought it into stark relief.”
Plus: “This is hard, because unlike sexy things displacing water and making shadows on ramps, ammunition and expendables are hidden away in bunkers out of sight … and if your peacetime military and diplomats do their job, will never be used. However, when you need them, the need is existential.”
THE TWITTER WHISTLEBLOWER EVERYBODY’S IGNORING:
Twitter’s power users in the media and commentariat have been pathologically obsessed with Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform since April. For his part, Musk has been happy to add fuel to the fire by providing several independent journalists with the Twitter Files, which exposed the activist nature of the company’s content moderation during the 2020 presidential election cycle. But back in July, well before the Musk/Twitter discourse went nuclear, Twitter’s former head of security released a shocking whistleblower report alleging, among other things:
that agents of foreign governments such as those of China and India had infiltrated the company and were on its payroll
that Twitter’s security systems were egregiously porous and could have allowed external organizations and foreign governments to monitor employee laptops and steal user data such as physical location of last login, phone number, etc.
that its database architecture was so flimsy that Twitter nearly permanently collapsed in the spring of 2021
that Twitter’s laughably poor management of user data prevented the company from even detecting, identifying, and resolving security breaches when they happenedand that company executives, particularly Parag Agrawal, preferred to lie about all these problems, rather than fix them
But compared to the discourse around Musk’s acquisition and the Twitter Files, the whistleblower report fell completely flat on media Twitter when it was published, and has received little attention in the narrative since. This couldn’t be because of the whistleblower’s lack of credibility: Peiter “Mudge” Zatko was a cybersecurity pioneer in the internet’s early days, and his pre-Twitter resume includes stints at Google, Stripe, and DARPA. Maybe the report’s allegations simply added up to a nothingburger? Not the case either—Mudge’s claims prompted a Congressional testimony, where he painted a picture of a company endlessly plagued by serious security issues and data breaches, exacerbated by an effete executive team that repeatedly denied, misdirected, and downplayed the extent of the problems. Let’s take a look.
More at the link.
TWITTER FILES PART SIX REVEALS FBI’S TIES TO TECH GIANT: ‘AS IF IT WERE A SUBSIDIARY.’
“The #TwitterFiles are revealing more every day about how the government collects, analyzes, and flags your social media content. Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary,” Taibbi began the thread on Friday. “Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth… a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.”
Taibbi highlighted the FBI’s social media task force established after the 2016 presidential election to monitor foreign interference prominently featured in the Twitter Files.
“Do agencies like FBI and DHS do in-house flagging work themselves, or farm it out? ‘You have to prove to me that inside the f—ing government you can do any kind of massive data or AI search,’ says one former intelligence officer,” Taibbi wrote.
Why, it’s as if: Head Of Twitter’s Censorship Operation Was A Former FBI, CIA Operative.
Related: Majority see FBI as Biden’s ‘personal Gestapo’ after Trump raid.
But why are these stories being dumped by Musk’s hand-picked journalists on the weekend? As Ace of Spades notes, “Of course he drops it late Friday afternoon, again. So… the media has an easier time ignoring it — bury news you don’t want covered with a Friday evening dump — and the only people who care about it, conservatives, have to blog about it Friday night. Yeah, let’s never hold this for Monday morning, ever. Not even a single time.”
GLENN LOURY: Affirmative Distraction: Racial preferences won’t solve racial inequality. In fact, they’re designed to do the opposite.
Racial preferences persist because they represent the path of least resistance. If an administrator of a selective institution saw that blacks were a minuscule percent of his student body, he would want to change that. If he found that admitting African-American students at a lower percentile of performance would ease his public-relations problem, then he would do it. But when thousands of people in that same situation make the same decision and place it beyond criticism, the goal of equality suffers. Failing to address ourselves to the developmental disparities manifest in test scores, as well as failing to change the dynamics of human development at the root of black underrepresentation in elite and selective venues, means failing to solve the inequality problem.
Head counts are no substitute for performance, and everyone knows it. No policy can paper over the racial dimension of academic disparities. True equality would seek to remedy the foundational circumstances reflected in the underrepresentation of African-Americans at the Bronx High School of Science, Brooklyn Tech, Holy Cross, or Harvard. I’m for racial equality, not patronization. Don’t patronize my people, inflict on us the consequences of a soft bigotry of low expectations, or presume that we’re not capable of manifesting excellence in the same way as any other people. Don’t judge blacks by a different standard.
But if you want to be a patron, patronizing is good.
December 16, 2022
AT AMAZON: Galvanized Raised Garden Beds for Vegetables Large Metal Planter Box Steel Kit Flower Herb, 6x3x1ft. #CommissionEarned.
OPEN THREAD: Party on.
THAT AIN’T A SHEPHERD: Why Firefly Got Shot Down.
MICROBIOME NEWS: Bacteria Inside You May Explain Why Weight Piles on After Dieting. “In trials involving mice being put through 10 different dieting protocols, species of Lactobacillus and their metabolites were shown to increase in the guts of the animals once their fasting ended and they were reintroduced to a less restricted diet. That microbiome change, the researchers discovered, assisted the intestinal tissues in absorbing more fat. It’s likely that the same process happens in the guts of humans, and periods of intermittent fasting or controlling calorie intake encourages the gut to increase its ability to extract fat from our diet, making it more likely for weight to be regained.”
MATT TAIBBI: Twitter as an FBI Subsidiary.
LEFTIST TOOLS: “Prebunking” can be an effective form of misinformation.
WHEN YOU POINTED UP THE VALUE OF EXERCISE OR VITAMIN D JUST A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, THAT MADE YOU “ANTI-SCIENCE.” BUT NOW: Study: Every little bit of physical activity counts in avoiding severe COVID-19.
A RADICAL PROPOSAL: America, We Can Choose Not to Tolerate Weirdos.
This is because weirdos come with a lot of baggage – if you’ll pardon the expression – that makes it very likely they will perform their jobs poorly. Look at that nuclear waste of space. Who is surprised that this bizarre person has BOLOs out across the globe for knicking women’s check-ins? Do you look at this dude and think, “Oh, here’s the kind of cool, steady hand I want guarding piles of plutonium”? Yeah, he just got fired, but why the hell was he/she/they/xip/xap/xorp ever hired?
Will this cause a rethink? Of course not. The guy is a nut. Except we’re told we can’t say that because … well, it will make the nuts feel bad. But they are still nuts whether we say it or not.
If they don’t feel bad for being nuts, will they ever have any incentive to change?
Related: Is Woke Fatigue Finally Setting In? “For years, from the office of the president of the United States to the local school boards and every office, activist, bureaucrat, and administrator in between, people have had racism, trans, and every other phobia and ‘ism’ pounded into them at every juncture. People who have known they are not racist are tired of defending themselves every minute, except perhaps when it comes to their children. And they also know that discussion is simply impossible. And even the true believers may be growing weary of confessing their sins with every other breath.”
FOOTNOTE TO A FOOTNOTE: Professor Glenn pointed out that:
For all their bleating about “our democracy,” America’s ruling class was so eager to shut down Donald Trump’s presidency that they were willing to do root-structural damage to that very democracy to do so, at the cost of destroying tens of millions of Americans’ faith in our institutions’ basic fairness and honesty. On the other hand, it’s now clear that that faith was misplaced.
Well, dig just a bit deeper and you’ll find the “disinformation hunter” industry is loaded with people who distributed…disinformation. Failed publisher Steven Brill (see, Brill’s Content –dead in 3 years– and Contentville — dead in less than 18 months) is trying to cash in on the “disinformation hunting” racket having launched “Newsguard“, which claims that “Newsguard data helps individuals, governments, companies, and organizations fight misinformation and teach media literacy through data integrations and other partnerships.” For a price of course.
But wait for it…wait for it: Newsguard’s “Board of Advisors” include (Ret.) General Michael Hayden, the former Director of the CIA, former Director of the National Security Agency, and former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence. Same clown who signed the notorious letter calling the Hunter Biden laptop “Russian disinformation” and I can find no apology from him.
It gets better. Also on that board of “Advisors” is Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, perhaps the greatest-ever fount of disinformation, wrong information, and unhinged, politically motivated editing by insane children.
Perhaps Brill was thinking the same way FDR was when he made Joseph Kennedy the first Commissioner of the SEC: It takes a thief, I guess.
FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY: Which One of You Strangers Is My Wife? “This week we have the strange case of the naked groom who wasn’t, the most honest arsonist of all time, and the Chicago Man who did what we all want to do sometimes.”
BE PREPARED: LEATHERMAN, Rev Pocket Size Multitool. #CommissionEarned
READER FAVORITE: Apple AirPods Pro (2nd Generation). #CommissionEarned
THIS IS THE WAY: How Denver schools improved: Choice, accountability.
But:
A union-backed school board majority is “dismantling” Denver’s success story, write Parker Baxter, who headed the UCD study, and education writer Alan Gottlieb in Education Next. The school board offers “vague platitudes about prioritizing traditional district-managed schools and focusing on equity,” they write. “Yet there’s no evidence that traditional neighborhood schools in this city have ever provided anything close to an equitable education for all of Denver’s kids.”
No success will go unpunished.
THE STIG LOSES HIS CAR KEYS: NBC News Suspends Reporter Ben Collins Over His Elon Musk Coverage.
NBC News temporarily suspended senior reporter Ben Collins for his “editorially inappropriate” coverage of Twitter CEO Elon Musk, according to the new publication Semafor.
Collins is temporarily prohibited from going on the airwaves of NBC News and MSNBC for his outward dissaproval of Musk and the tech magnate’s actions, Semafor reported, citing anonymous sources. Collins covers disinformation, extremism and the internet for NBC News.
* * * * * * * *
The reporter also lamented Musk’s release of the “Twitter Files” through Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi, which intended to disclose the social media company’s suppression of the New York Post’s report on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Collins’ suspension is due to the reporter’s coverage of Musk earlier in December, according to Semafor.
“Imagine throwing it all away to do PR work for the richest person in the world,” NBC reporter Ben Collins tweeted. “Humiliating shit. Speak* truth** to*** power.”
Related: How Disinformation Journalists Practice Disinformation.
(Classical reference in headline.)
WHO YOU GONNA BELIEVE, JOE OR YOUR OWN LYIN’ BANK STATEMENT? U.S. Misery Index Belies Biden’s ‘Hopeful Economy’ Malarkey.