Author Archive: Stephen Green
December 15, 2022
THAT’S BECAUSE THEY’RE ON THE SIDE OF INFLATING AWAY THEIR DEBTS: Democrats Are Getting Very Nervous About the Fed’s War on Inflation.
WHAT ARE THE LONGTERM EMOTIONAL EFFECTS OF GESTATING WITHOUT A MOTHER’S PRESENCE? The Real-Life Matrix: ‘EctoLife’ Artificial Womb Facility to Engineer, Grow Babies in ‘Factory.’
META ACTUALLY HAD A POLICY ALLOWING THIS: Zuckerberg U-Turns on Facebook People Smuggling Posts Following Scrutiny.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook is ending a policy that allowed illegal immigrants to use the platform to seek people smugglers to ferry them across the U.S. border, admitting that much of the activity is tantamount to “human exploitation” and “overlaps” with human trafficking.
You don’t say.
HOW NOT TO HANDLE A CITY SUFFERING FROM POPULATION LOSS AND DIMINISHED TOURISM: City Sidewalks, Busy Sidewalks: NYC Health Commissioner Wants Masks Back on the Streets.
I GUESS “THE CHINESE WAY” WAS TO PUT OFF THE INEVITABLE UNTIL THEY NO LONGER COULD: Covid cases explode in Beijing leaving city streets empty and daily life disrupted. “On Wednesday, China’s National Health Commission (NHC) gave up trying to keep track of all the new Covid cases, announcing it would no longer include asymptomatic infections in its daily count. It had previously reported these cases, albeit in a separate category from ‘confirmed,’ or symptomatic ones.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: DeSantis Won’t Let COVID Vax Charlatans Off the Hook. “At this point, people who still trust the government when it comes to public health should be institutionalized.”
FALLOUT: China bans export of its Loongson CPUs to Russia.
China is the subject of many semiconductor export restrictions, but it seems the Asian nation is also banning the export of its own Loongson CPUs to Russia and elsewhere. It’s likely to be a significant blow to Russia, which has been looking for an alternative to AMD and Intel processors since the companies stopped shipments to the country following its invasion of Ukraine.
Kommersant business daily (via Tom’s Hardware), citing sources close to Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development and in the electronics market, writes that the Chinese government has banned the supply of Loongson processors based on its own LoongArch architecture to the Russian Federation and other countries.
The reasons for banning the chip exports to Russia aren’t the same as other countries; it’s because they are used in China’s military-industrial complex.
I guess China doesn’t have the fab capacity to spare.
Related: ARM won’t sell its latest chip designs in China due to US and UK export controls.
SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE IS IN A MEDICALLY INDUCED COMA: Deportations Plunge Under Biden in US Interior.
The change stems from Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a Biden appointee, directing ICE agents to focus on illegal immigrants deemed a threat to national security, public safety, or border security. Each deportation, under the directive, requires an assessment of whether the illegal immigrant poses one or more of these threats.
Biden administration officials have defended the change, claiming that it’s paid dividends in part by an increase in the arrest and removal of illegal aliens convicted of aggravated felonies.
Critics note that there was a decline in the removal of aliens convicted of any felony.
Why, it’s almost as though the Administration has engineered a crisis by design.
FOR OUR VIP SUPPORTERS: Musk Is Cutting Twitter to the Bone, and the Lamentations of the Karens Are Glorious. “The story could begin — and end — with what Musk did when he found dead-ender execs racking up six figures worth of chartered jets right before he bought the company. But the story just keeps getting better, even after that.”
December 14, 2022
TWO CHEERS FOR AVATAR? ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ Offers Subversive Defense of Nuclear Family.
HEROES NOT WANTED: Detroit School District Votes to Remove Dr. Ben Carson’s Name From High School. “Dr. Carson grew up in a Detroit housing project before going on to become a ground-breaking neurosurgeon. He became the youngest chief of pediatric neurosurgery in the nation at the age of 33. In 1987 he led the surgical team that performed the first successful separation of conjoined twins. Carson is famed in his field for developing new surgery techniques and successfully managing some of the most difficult pediatric neurosurgery cases in the nation.”
HOW’S THAT MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEM COMING ALONG? Beijing’s nuclear strategy has long been surprisingly modest. So why did it just double its nuclear arsenal? “China has been stepping up its nuclear ambitions. In 2016, China elevated what is now known as the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF), which controls China’s land-based missile arsenal, to the status of fourth service branch, alongside the army, navy and air force — a signal of the growing prioritization of the country’s nuclear deterrent.”
I’M SO OLD, I REMEMBER WHEN JOE BIDEN WAS GOING TO RESTORE COMPETENCE TO GOVERNMENT: 9 million people received emails that mistakenly said their student loan forgiveness was approved.
Meanwhile: Supreme Court to hear 2nd dispute over Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan.
AHEAD OF THE CURVE: Trump Was Right: Bipartisan Push in Congress to Ban TikTok Underway.
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Texas School District Takes a Stand for the Kids, Votes to Allow Guns for Trained Staff.
TWITTER IS FUN AGAIN, JUST NOT FOR THEM: Liberals struggle to find viable Twitter alternative after Musk takeover.
Some of Twitter’s disaffected have closed their accounts. Many more have kept their Twitter handles while adopting new ones on other sites, thronging the virtual gates of previously unheralded platforms Mastodon, Hive and Post.
Now, social media colonists are laboring to rebuild their networks on new sites while keeping an eye on the old one, to see how the Twitter wars play out.
“I think Twitter is falling apart,” said David Karpf, a political scientist at the George Washington University. “I’m also going to be one of the last people to leave Twitter.”Karpf joined Twitter in 2008. He amassed a following one tweet at a time until 2019, when he penned a post that likened conservative columnist Bret Stephens to a bedbug. Stephens complained. The exchange went viral. Karpf’s following exploded.
After Musk swept in, Karpf followed the lead of many in academia. He opened an account on Mastodon, a decentralized social network launched in 2016. All but unknown last spring, Mastodon now claims more than 2 million users, a milestone announced, ironically, on Twitter.
Not ironic — necessary. Otherwise, no one would notice outside of Mastodon’s minuscule echo chamber.
THE RULES HAVE CHANGED: Young Voters Losing Enthusiasm for Democrats — But So What? “The only thing that matters in the age of mail-in voting is getting the ballots out to your people and harvesting them back in, in numbers greater than the other side.”
JOE BIDEN’S NEGOTIATING PARTNERS: Iranian footballer sentenced to execution for ‘campaigning for women’s rights.’
Amir Nasr-Azadani, who once played for the national under-16s team, was arrested in September for allegedly taking part in an “armed riot” in Isfahan in which three members of the security forces were killed.
The 26-year-old defender with Iranjavan Bushehr FC was charged with “rebellion, membership in illegal gangs, collusion to undermine security and therefore assisting in moharabeh”.
The charge of moharabeh, meaning “waging war against God”, carries the death penalty in Iran.
The Mahsa Amini protests have been going strong for three months now, and show little sign of slowing down despite Tehran’s increasingly harsh measures.
KRUISER: Thom Tillis Wants to Speed Up the GOP’s Amnesty Death Spiral. “When I see what Republican senators like Tillis, Mitch McConnell, and Mitt Romney are up to, I’m convinced that they don’t care if they are in the minority forever. I invite anybody to provide evidence that I’m wrong. I want to be wrong.”
IN THE FACE OF WEAPONIZED SOCIAL PRESSURE AGAINST DOING SO: Rate of detransition among ‘trans’ youth higher than activists claim. “At the Re/Detrans Canada event held last month at York University in Ontario, recent studies were revealed that show detransition rates up to nearly 30 percent.”