FASTER, PLEASE: Climate Change Motivates a Reevaluation of Nuclear Energy.
Archive for 2022
November 18, 2022
FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY: TSA Found a What in Her WHAT? “This week we have the curious case of the chicken that didn’t squawk, a novel cure for homelessness, and PolitiFact ruining everything for everyone.”
TWITTER’S EX-‘TRUST AND SAFETY’ HEAD IN THE NYT: MUSK BETTER WATCH OUT. Paywalled, because for people who hate free markets, NYT sure does like its revenue. But a couple of his points (excerpted here) while good ones, have easy solutions:
Twitter remains bound by the laws and regulations of the countries in which it operates. Amid the spike in racial slurs on Twitter in the days after the acquisition, the European Union’s chief platform regulator took to the site to remind Mr. Musk that, in Europe, an unmoderated free-for-all won’t fly… Mr. Musk’s principle of keying Twitter’s policies on local laws could push the company to censor speech it has been loath to restrict in the past, including political dissent.
For the nominally “free” world, this has a solution so obvious that the fact nobody ever suggests it is itself disturbing: censor the tweet content as required by law but have it still remain on the timeline with a notice saying “This tweet is blocked due to local laws.” (Do it here, too!) If governments want to pass laws requiring the censorship be secret, let them try.
There is one more source of power on the web — one that most people don’t think much about, but which may be the most significant check on unrestrained speech on the mainstream internet: the app stores operated by Google and Apple…. In my time at Twitter, representatives of the app stores regularly raised concerns about content available on our platform. On one occasion, a member of an app review team contacted Twitter, saying with consternation that he had searched for “#boobs” in the Twitter app and was presented with … exactly what you’d expect. Another time, on the eve of a major feature release, a reviewer sent screenshots of several days-old tweets containing an English-language racial slur, asking Twitter representatives whether they should be permitted to appear on the service.
First, tell me more about how Apple likes to blackmail app developers over allowing free expression. (Maybe Congress would like to know about that too.) Second, throwing Twitter out of the app store for free speech is just too dumb a move for Apple to make. They can do it to smaller, less politically important apps, but we live in a country where we put Microsoft through the antitrust wringer for bundling a browser with Windows. Apple’s app store is a cash geyser; they can’t afford to risk getting it trustbusted just to shut down the Babylon Bee again.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: What To Look For In A Good Knife.
BLACK FRIDAY DEAL: Green Beam Laser Level. #CommissionEarned
REMEMBER WHEN THEY TOLD US THAT MERRICK GARLAND WAS A STRAIGHT-SHOOTING MODERATE PERFECT FOR THE SUPREME COURT? Attorney General Garland to Name Special Counsel in Trump Criminal Investigations.
Related: WaPo Sheepishly Admits the FBI Found No Nuclear Secrets, or Anything Else, in Mar-a-Lago Raid.
Flashback: Merrick Garland has proved himself unfit for Supreme Court — but he shouldn’t be AG either.
SAME AS ALWAYS, THEY’RE HIDING SOMETHING: What in the wide, wide world of sports is going on with the Paul Pelosi story?
On October 28th, word broke that Paul Pelosi had been violently attacked in their San Francisco home by an intruder, who (as I wrote about here) was immediately spun up to be a right-wing terrorist spurred to action by Republican rhetoric and expressed conservative (read: RACIST/ELECTION DENYING/EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO DEMOCRACY) values. That narrative was quickly blown into smithereens by the well-documented history of suspect David DePape himself, but what was left unclear were pretty pertinent details of the incident itself, from the point where the police arrived.
Initially reported at the police press conference as an “unknown person” opening the door for officers – leading everyone to question “Who’s this 3d person?” – it was later clarified that Paul Pelosi himself opened the door. Who then walked away from officers, back to DePape, his about-to-become assailant.
From that point forward the whole story goes to black A veritable information blockade was thrown up, apparently through the concerted and targeted efforts of the Pelosis, the media machine, command elements of the San Franciso Police Department and Department of Justice, with intense pressure applied to squelch any further discussion outside of the tightly controlled narrative Nancy Pelosi is dribbling to acceptable outlets.
Well, that’s because they’re hiding something.
I’VE SEEN THE LOCKDOWNS AND THE DAMAGE DONE: Cancer diagnoses lag after screenings fall during pandemic, U.S. study finds.
Related:
THE TYRANNY OF THE CAMPUS HR DEPARTMENT. In 19 years at FIRE, I saw a lot of abuses, but now that I’m in private practice I can see that HR has been weaponized even more than I thought. Here are just a few of the “offenses” that spurred abusive HR investigations we’ve dealt with in our small, fairly new practice alone:
- Hanging a movie poster in a faculty office that the movie director had personally autographed.
- Instructing an undergraduate that the faculty member’s recommendation was needed to get into graduate school.
- Refusing to write an undergraduate recommendation after the student failed to provide application materials.
- Exchanging gardening pictures of flowers with a staff member.
If you or someone you know is going through this now, shoot them a link — it might tell them what to expect, and I presume it applies at many companies as well.
DA TECHGUY: Reality Doesn’t Care What Twitter Employees Think or Nobody has Repealed the Laws of Supply and Demand. “Put simply while the supposedly bright people at Twitter who are considering leaving may have forgotten the laws of supply and demand Elon Musk hasn’t and if they think Twitter is suddenly going to go black because a bunch of them, even the majority of them choose to leave, then frankly [they’re] too stupid to be working at any company Musk owns.”
If Musk makes Twitter work with a headcount 80% smaller than when he bought the company, I’m even more curious to see what the tech industry shakeout might be.
CHANGE: Elon Just Unbanned the Babylon Bee.
DEMS PREPARE IRS TO CRUSH EVANGELICALS: Buried in the laughably titled “Respect for Marriage Act” now before the Senate are provisions authorizing the IRS to jerk tax-exemption from any church or non-profit social service agency that refuses to support the LGBQT agenda regarding marriage.
What will come in the months following enactment will be a swarm of gay couples demanding that evangelical pastors perform wedding ceremonies that many of them will refuse, as a matter of faith, to do. There will similarly be gay couples demanding that religious-based adoption agencies that only match orphans with intact heterosexual couples abandon their beliefs.
In other words, the full force of the federal government is being prepared for the assault on tax-exempt churches and church-related social service agencies that liberals have dreamed of for decades.
UPDATE: Sen. James Lankford explains in detail why Respect for Marriage Act threatens religious liberty:
GOODER AND HARDER, LA: Hmmm: Suspect in vehicular assault on law-enforcement recruits released 24 hours later. “If the evidence is there, and the LASO has probable cause to charge him, why is [Nicholas Joseph] Gutierrez walking free? None of the media outlets covering this mention [George] Gascón by name, but this leaves the impression that the LASO — and likely other LA-area law enforcement agencies — have little trust in Gascón and the DA’s office these days. They seem to want a case so solid that Gascón cannot possibly deal it down without taking enormous political risks.”
WHEN SUPPLY MEETS DEMAND: Tap Oil Fields, Not Our Emergency Reserves, to Lower Energy Prices.
THEY’RE GENUINELY AFRAID HE’LL MAKE IT FREE-SPEECH PLATFORM AGAIN: Democrats Ask the FTC to Investigate Musk for ‘Undermining’ Twitter.
UM: Massive flock of sheep has been walking in a circle for 12 days straight in China. “Video of the strange scene was tweeted Wednesday by Chinese state-run outlet People’s Daily, which reported the sheep are perfectly healthy and the cause of the behavior remains a mystery.”
NICHOLAS WADE: GOP-Controlled House Should Investigate Covid Origins. The next Congress should investigate not only how the virus emerged but also the institutional failures that obscured the search for truth. The committee should demand answers from the CDC and NIH, the intelligence agencies, the National Academy of Sciences, and the editors of Science, Nature, and the Lancet.
THE BEST NEWS YET: “TWITTER’S MODERATION SYSTEM IS IN TATTERS.”
“At this moment, we have nobody to reach out to,” says Nina Santos, a researcher at the Brazilian National Institute of Science & Technology in Digital Democracy. “All the people that we were talking with are no longer there.” Santos says that until Musk’s takeover, Twitter had been “quite responsive” in taking down rule-breaking content that could undermine trust in the election or spread disinformation, compared to Meta and Google. The entirety of Twitter’s Brazil team was included in the 7,500 people laid off earlier this month.
Although Lula was declared the winner of the election, Santos says she still sees tweets questioning the result or calling for mobilization against the government. All of these, she says, are dangerous.
No, lady, you are dangerous, and you and those like you here in the U.S. need to be stopped.