HOW IT STARTED: Hamas kills 40 babies and children — beheading some of them — at Israeli kibbutz.
How it’s going:
They murdered our babies while they are sleeping on their beds, we are providing their babies Incubators.
Never been prouder to be an israeli. pic.twitter.com/3KKajYWEzG— raz sauber – רז זאובר (@raz_sauber) November 14, 2023
Meanwhile, this CBS News headline spins the news as something Joe Biden did.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Nikki Haley: Enemy of Free Speech? “If Haley hadn’t already fallen off my list of candidates I might possibly vote for in Colorado’s Republican primary next spring, she removed herself from it with extreme prejudice on Tuesday when she came out against free speech on the internet.”
OOPS: Google witness accidentally blurts out that Apple gets 36% cut of Safari deal.
Google and Apple objected to making this key detail public from their long-running default search deal. But their closely held secret came out on Monday during testimony from Google’s main economics expert, Kevin Murphy, during the Department of Justice’s monopoly trial examining Google’s search business.
“Probably the biggest slip of the entire trial,” Big Tech on Trial, an account dedicated to providing updates from the Google trial, posted on X (formerly Twitter).
According to Bloomberg Law, Google attorney John Schmidtlein “visibly cringed” when Murphy revealed the confidential information, which Google had initially claimed needed to be kept secret because otherwise it “would unreasonably undermine Google’s competitive standing in relation to both competitors and other counterparties.”
Having that kind of cash to keep Google as Safari’s default search engine certainly doesn’t “undermine Google’s competitive standing.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Republicans Had a Goofy, Feisty Day on Capitol Hill. “I may occasionally get frustrated when the GOP can’t get together for simple things like impeaching loathsome Democrats, but I never want to see the party go all hivemind like the Dems.”
THE FUTURE USUALLY ARRIVES SOONER THAN YOU’RE READY FOR IT: A Scientist Says the Singularity Will Happen by 2031.
There’s at least one expert who believes that “the singularity”—the moment when artificial intelligence surpasses the control of humans—could be just a few years away. That’s a lot shorter than current predictions regarding the timeline of AI dominance, especially considering that AI dominance is not exactly guaranteed in the first place.
Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNET—who holds a Ph.D. from Temple University and has worked as a leader of Humanity+ and the Artificial General Intelligence Society—told Decrypt that he believes artificial general intelligence (AGI) is three to eight years away. AGI is the term for AI that can truly perform tasks just as well has humans, and it’s a prerequisite for the singularity soon following.
Verner Vinge pegged it as happening in 2025. When — if? — it arrives, few will be prepared for it because we still don’t really know what it is or how it will behave.
DEMOCRACY DIES IN DARKNESS: WaPo Censors Cartoon That Depicts Hamas Accurately.
HIS BEST-BUY DATE WAS YEARS AGO AND HIS BEST WAS NEVER GOOD: Another Day, Another Terrifying Biden Glitch.
WHEN YOU’VE TOLD THE STORY, STOP TELLING IT: Oh, Thank Goodness Disney Is Finally Doing the Right Thing… Almost.
NEWS YOU CAN USE? Google Is About To Delete Gmail And Photos Content Next Month — Here’s What You Need To Know. “The impact will be limited to personal accounts not accessed in the past two years. Active users interacting with their Google accounts within this period are exempt from this data deletion.”
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: Escape From New York… While You Still Can. “New York Gov. Kathy Hochul — aka Big Brother in a Pants Suit — says her administration will “collect data” and “reach out to people when we see hate speech being spoken about on social media. Did I really just call Hochul ‘Big Brother in a Pants Suit?’ Sorry, my bad, that was uncalled for. What I meant to say is, ‘New York’s Big Brother in a Pants Suit just introduced her social credit scheme in drag.'”
SAD: Stellantis offers buyouts to roughly half of U.S. salaried workers. “The move marks the latest cost-cutting efforts for the U.S. auto industry, as companies attempt to reduce costs amid economic concerns and billions of dollars in new investments for emerging technologies such as electric vehicles.”
ONLY IF IT INVOLVES A 10% CUT: Netanyahu Issues Dire Warning About Hamas. Will Biden Listen?
HMM: The NRA Is Going Broke And Moving To Texas. “The move to Texas itself is not unexpected. In August, there was a story that the NRA was closing in on a new headquarters in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. And indeed, there are sound reasons to move to the Lone Star State, though Wayne and his cronies are pulling the trigger way too late to save themselves from the legal difficulties that have ensnared them in New York.”
YOU STAY CLASSY, JOE: Joe Biden Called Obama Adviser David Axelrod a What Now?
IT LOOKS LIKE A DONE DEAL: Turkish parliament commission to debate Sweden NATO bid Thursday.
With the addition of Finland earlier this year, Vladimir Putin has done more to bring NATO right to Russia’s border than Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, or Joe Biden ever did.
GOOD NEWS FOR CERTAIN SHOPPERS, BAD SIGN FOR THE ECONOMY: US retailers stuck with excess stock offer bargains as holiday season nears. “As the holiday shopping season approaches, major U.S. retailers from Dollar General (DG.N) to Walmart (WMT.N) and Macy’s (M.N) could be saddled with too much stock for a second straight year, according to a Reuters analysis, jeopardizing retailers’ profit margins and generating steep discounts for shoppers.”
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Hamas Götterdämmerung.
THE HOME FRONT: Moscow Purges Security Officials And Takes Preventative Steps In North Caucasus.
Perhaps more notable is what appears to be a major purge of security officials in Dagestan itself and the beginning of major preventative measures among the youth in Russia to prevent any recurrence of such actions across Russia, particularly in the predominantly non-Russian regions. Neither of these actions may be enough to solve the problem, and both may provoke more unrest down the road (Dagpravda.ru, November 7; Rossiyskaya gazeta, November 8).
Moscow is clearly trying to present itself as being on the right side of condemning anti-Semitism. Russian officials have taken this opportunity to exploit these outbursts to tighten control over a long-restive region. In addition, these moves clearly reflect unease in the Kremlin. There is fear that the situation in the North Caucasus and other non-Russian regions is rapidly coming to a boil.
Being on “the right side” of antisemitism is great. Still, it might not be the surest way to restore order in a semiautonomous republic populated with people generally unfriendly to Israel and Jews.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Maybe Joe Biden Forgot He’s American. “I’ve long maintained that Democrats begin to believe their own lies after they’ve told them often enough. They have been peddling the ‘conservative domestic terror threat’ garbage for so long that they’re not very bothered by real terrorists. They’re living in a dark, twisted, land of make-believe.”
DON’T RENEW IT: A Powerful Tool US Spies Misused to Stalk Women Faces Its Potential Demise.
The federal law authorizing a vast amount of the United States government’s foreign intelligence collection is set to expire in two months, a deadline that threatens to mothball a notoriously extensive surveillance program currently eavesdropping on the phone calls, text messages, and emails of no fewer than a quarter million people overseas.
The US National Security Agency (NSA) relies heavily on the program, known as Section 702, to compel the cooperation of communications giants that oversee huge swaths of the internet’s traffic. The total number of communications intercepted under the 702 program each year, while likely beyond tally, ostensibly reaches into the high hundreds of millions, according to scraps of reportage declassified by the intelligence community over the past decade, and the secret surveillance court whose macroscopic oversight—even when brought to full bear against the program—scarcely takes issue with any quotidian abuses of its power.
As of now, members of Congress have introduced exactly zero bills to prevent 702 from sunsetting on January 1, 2024, even though many—perhaps a majority—view this intelligence “crown jewel” as fundamental to the national defense, a flawed but fixable law.
Mass surveillance is a great way to build dossiers on ordinary Americans but generally a lousy way to catch terrorists who — as we saw in Gaza last month — are smart enough to avoid it.
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