“Everyone is in favor of free speech… but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.” ― Winston Churchill
Lots of drama over this at Twitter. Elon directly involved. 27 million views and counting, despite some blockages Elon had to clear up: For example, Twitter’s head of Trust & Safety is no longer with the company.
If you can, watch today. FREE on Twitter for 24 hrs. I think that will end around 8PM today.
WhatIsAWoman?
After that, check out Elon’s interview with the Babylon Bee. Great discussion.
I’m @hershblogger on Twitter.
“The House ran out the clock…”
If it gets to the House, we can hope that’s what happens to Senate bill 686, the RESTRICT Act: Never put to a vote.
That bill is actually peripheral to this post, but is a perfect example of extending surveillance-state tentacles (which we’ll get to).
Ostensibly, the bill defends us against the CCP controlled TikTok spyware – beloved of goofy pre-teens and sinister trans-activists.
I also detest TikTok. Its CCP data gathering on our youth is unacceptable, and its transactivist influencer contingent is culturally corrosive. It should, at least, have age limitations applied to some of its more vile content, with solid parental locking capability. Knock, knock Jeffrey Marsh. We don’t have to respect you even a tiny bit. In fact, we despise you for your pride in being a groomer.
But the RESTRICT bill includes no such provisions; it is written without even reference to ““TikTok,” or parent company “ByteDance,” or even “social media.”” Much less the Chinese Communist Party. That mention could be problematic for Gretchen Whitmer, so I get why the bill can’t name China.
TikTok should be certainly be banned on government devices. In fact, any government employee so unaware of TikTok’s pedigree as to have it on their government device should be fired. It’s not like these people aren’t “woke”, of course they are, it’s that they’re not AWARE. But, ignorance is not only not an excuse, it’s a sign of national security cluelessness. Loose clicks sink ships.
Or, more commonsensically, all government devices could ALREADY be set up to prohibit TikTok installation and block any access to it. Do it by executive order, since it affects only employees – supposedly loyal.
However, there’s no surveillance-state advantage in something so simple.
The RESTRICT Act Would Restrict a Lot More Than TikTok
RESTRICT, as written, simply expands and cements the power of government to abrogate the First Amendment as described below.
We can’t shoot down a Chinese spy balloon while it’s actively, successfully spying, but we can extend state control over Americans watching their kids do silly dances on a Chinese spy app – which the government hasn’t absolutely banned on every device it owns.
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The rest of this post offers links to some articles which may be too long for your interest. I post them even so because they describe, without hyperbole, an imminently serious threat to the Republic of the United States. Even if you don’t want to spend the time now, they may become a reference for you when you need to provide a Progressive you know with reasoned information about the danger to a way of life they don’t even understand as their own. I have a suggestion.
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Who is doing anything about this?
Whether Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter will be successful is a question still in doubt for certain definitions of “success.” I’m looking at it as a defense of Enlightenment values, freedom of conscience being the foundational moral imperative.
I do not think the measure is whether it becomes a profitable business. Musk did not buy it for that reason.
I hope profitability eventuates, because we desperately need a continuing social media space not attached at the hip to, or gripped around the throat by, myriad US agencies forming alliances with private companies eager to subvert the First Amendment.
Significant Twitter personnel changes were a bare start in blunting the public-pirate (AKA fascist) alliance against free speech. More importantly, we have insight to the corruption from Musk’s release of internal documents (the “Twitter Files”) and source code algorithms.
The public’s glimpses into the early stages of the transformation of America from democracy to digital leviathan are the result of lawsuits and FOIAs—information that had to be pried from the security state—and one lucky fluke. If Elon Musk had not decided to purchase Twitter, many of the crucial details in the history of American politics in the Trump era would have remained secret, possibly forever.
That quote is from an important, sober – and sobering – recent history of America’s public/pirate surveillance state.
It’s also long, but if you want to better understand the stakes – and what I hope could eventually be Musk’s success – it is a must read. Incisive and insightful.
A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century – Tablet Magazine
13000 words
Mentioned in the preceding article, a scathing in depth analysis from the Columbia Journalism Review of the mendacious “Russiagate” media coverage.
The press versus the president, parts one through 4
Part 1
6200 words
Part 2
6500 words
Part 3
4800 words
Part 4
8700 words
Running List of All Twitter Files Releases (summarized with links to detail)
? words
When The Other Club lived at Google, I had for a time, a Twitter account to which each new post would automatically Tweet.
Twitter worked hard to convince me that I wanted nothing to do with it, so I deleted the account. A long ago time now, and I don’t even remember my old handle.
Yesterday I rejoined Twitter as my small note of encouragement to @elonmusk. The entertainment value of the sink is alone worth the price of admission.
This is the first post which (should) automatically appear as a Tweet from the WordPress version of TOC.
Glenn Greenwald’s Tweets on the hissing pussycats at “Robin D’Angelo Junior High — also known as the national desk of The Washington Post” are devastatingly hilarious. It’s a left-on-left tag-team cage-match.
The fighting started when WaPo reporter Dave Weigel retweeted Cam Harless.
No idea who Cam Harless is, but he’s irrelevant after the internecine bombardments commence. Felicia Sonmez is an aggrieved WaPo reporter, who seems unaware that “believe all women” is over since Robby Mook’s implication of Hillary Clinton in the Steele dossier psy-op. Not to mention Amber Heard, for whom I’ve heard a personal “poop emoji” has been created.
Greenwald’s commentary caught my attention because of his victim point scoring comments (below). Because, in a 2019 post – Victimhood competence hierarchies – I attempted to describe the tools needed for sorting out the victimhood pecking order. A slice from that post:
Let’s consider the complexities via example. Rate a black, homosexual male, wealthy actor; vs. a white, trans-female, wealthy former Pentathlon champion; vs. a brown, female, anti-semitic, Islamist congressional member; vs. a white, 1/1024th Amerind, biological female, wealthy United States Senator. It’s not easy, and those are only a few of the factors. The enterprise seems very difficult.
This is the type of analysis intersectionalists demand as a principle of governance. And, that’s just a poor preliminary attempt to begin to capture the variables currently driving the SJW power struggle. It doesn’t include anywhere near the required profile information. I tried filling it in for a couple of people I thought would help refine scoring. Maybe you can guess who they are.
Complicating this further, just when you might think you have a workable algorithm, someone gets offended by something you did not expect. For example, here’s an example of a lesbian, trans, Leftist, female academic in the Humanities you’d expect to score moderately well even if she is white: A concrete example against which to test our calculation of the victim/oppressor ratio.
If you think the Progs would by now have established their own official scoring system, you’re missing the point. They all aspire to be Thomas Wolsey or Torquemada in a quest to adjudicate their own martyrdom. Any reference to a set of rules could inhibit the exercise of power.
E.g., constitutional law.
I noted the victimhood ranking problem 5 other times (now 6) under the tag ‘victimhood competence.’
I do not have a Twitter account, and I had to temporarily drop my browser shields to even see Greenwald’s thread. It is worth reading. It’s not like you have to log in.
Anyway, this is the snippet that caught my eye:
After WPost reporter @Feliciasonmez publicly accused multiple Post reporters and editors — including @jdelreal — of supporting misogyny against her, Del Real retorted that he was the only Mexican American on the national desk and also gay. Experts are tabulating the outcome.
…
For those scoring the various victimhood points at home, among the starring marginalized actors in the WPost oppression drama, 2 are graduates of Harvard University (Sonmez and Del Real) while the other was raised in Greenwich, CT, and educated in Swiss boarding schools (Lorenz).Glenn Greenwald
@ggreenwald
Surgeon general Dr. Vivek Murthy has instructed major tech platforms, already squirming under Congress’ thumb, to submit information about CCP virus COVID ‘misinformation’ on social media, search engines, instant messaging systems, etc., etc.. Big Tech is to determine how much misinformation has flowed/is flowing through their sites.
He doesn’t mention email, but – in the name of ‘Public Health’ – I see no barrier to him asking NSA for a dump of all email with the phrases “Fauci lies,” “Joe Rogan,” “Wuhan flu,” or “Great Barrington Declaration,” and/or the words “ivermectin,” “hydrochloroquine,” “zinc,” and “Z-pack” in any combination.
As explained in the Federal Register, Dr. Murthy wants to know
“exactly how many users saw or may have been exposed to instances of Covid-19 misinformation,” [as well as] “Any aggregate data and analysis on how many users were exposed, were potentially exposed, or otherwise engaged with COVID-19 misinformation…
“The definition of health misinformation for the purposes of this RFI is health information that is false, inaccurate, or misleading according to the best available evidence at the time…
Starting with, but not limited to, these common examples of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation documented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), any aggregate data and analysis on the prevalence of COVID-19 misinformation on individual platforms including exactly how many users saw or may have been exposed to instances of COVID-19 misinformation.”
So is the flip-flop advice from CDC about whether N-95 masks work serial misinformation? How about whether cloth masks work? Is it about the possibility the CCP virus leaked from a Chinese lab? Careers were stunted for asking that question. Scientists were heartily vilified.
Is it misinformation that natural immunity doesn’t count? How about counting death with COVID as death from COVID?
Is this misinformation from the CDC?
“MYTH: COVID-19 vaccines can alter my DNA.
FACT: COVID-19 vaccines do not change or interact with your DNA in any way.Both messenger RNA (mRNA) and viral vector COVID-19 vaccines work by delivering instructions (genetic material) to our cells to start building protection against the virus that causes COVID-19.
After the body produces an immune response, it discards all the vaccine ingredients just as it would discard any information that cells no longer need. This process is a part of normal body functioning.
The genetic material delivered by mRNA vaccines never enters the nucleus of your cells, which is where your DNA is kept. Viral vector COVID-19 vaccines deliver genetic material to the cell nucleus to allow our cells to build protection against COVID-19. However, the vector virus does not have the machinery needed to integrate its genetic material into our DNA, so it cannot alter our DNA.”
That myth/fact distinction seems to be not so settled science. BNT162b2 is the Pfizer vaccine. You can skip to the sentence I bolded:
Intracellular Reverse Transcription of Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 In Vitro in Human Liver Cell Line
“Preclinical studies of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine BNT162b2, developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, showed reversible hepatic effects in animals that received the BNT162b2 injection. Furthermore, a recent study showed that SARS-CoV-2 RNA can be reverse-transcribed and integrated into the genome of human cells. In this study, we investigated the effect of BNT162b2 on the human liver cell line Huh7 in vitro. Huh7 cells were exposed to BNT162b2, and quantitative PCR was performed on RNA extracted from the cells. We detected high levels of BNT162b2 in Huh7 cells and changes in gene expression of long interspersed nuclear element-1 (LINE-1), which is an endogenous reverse transcriptase. Immunohistochemistry using antibody binding to LINE-1 open reading frame-1 RNA-binding protein (ORFp1) on Huh7 cells treated with BNT162b2 indicated increased nucleus distribution of LINE-1. PCR on genomic DNA of Huh7 cells exposed to BNT162b2 amplified the DNA sequence unique to BNT162b2. Our results indicate a fast up-take of BNT162b2 into human liver cell line Huh7, leading to changes in LINE-1 expression and distribution. We also show that BNT162b2 mRNA is reverse transcribed intracellularly into DNA in as fast as 6 h upon BNT162b2 exposure.”
The misinformation definition does include “best available information at the time.” Which would seem sensible but for the examples of such information flipping back and forth on masking, for example, and D. Fauci’s admission that he lied about it. As he also admittedly lied about the threshold for herd immunity.
So, who determines the best available information? The government bureaucrats? Whom we know lie for political and CYA purposes?
When is mis actually dis? Maybe when spreading information you know to be false? Like Dr. Fauci’s mask/herd immunity lies, or his semantic games around gain-of-function, or his surreptitious interference with the Great Barrington Declaration?
And when does “at the time” expire? Is “vaccines do not change or interact with your DNA in any way,” now misinformation? Half-misinformation? It’s only been shown in vitro, after all. The ‘Public Health’ narrative is that we don’t tell the public until there have been a couple of gold-standard RTCs in vivo. The public won’t mis this information. If they had it they might choose not to follow our advice about an experimental vaccine.
What Dr. Murthy’s definition means is ‘whatever we tell you at the time.’ And with the threat of Congressional regulation, he’s looking to enforce that under the “Public Health” version of the 1st Amendment. So, it’s far from over when Murthy gets the social media data.
Why wouldn’t he also have to know about the disproportionate effects of the CDC’s unconstitutional seizure of the rental housing market?
The Other Club was first published February 19, 2005 on Google’s Blogspot.
I have included a first day post below. It celebrated a display of American valor and courage that had taken place 60 years earlier.
In 2005 “valor and courage” would have been a nearly universal opinion. The memory would have invoked reverence and gratitude. Seventeen years later, I wonder…
As the post went up, Myspace was the largest social networking site in the world. The first ever Tweet was 13 months in the future. Facebook would not open to the general public for almost 18 months. YouTube had come online 4 days earlier. Ask Jeeves was still a thing. Google Maps had just been launched on February 8. Pandora was to be launched on August 25. Tumblr was 2 years in the future.
Surveillance capitalism was just booting up.
If you wanted to be notified of a new post at any given blog, you would subscribe to its RSS feed. If it supported one. To find other sites you might find interesting, you depended on blogrolls and word of mouth.
Content wasn’t targeted at you based on deep learning analysis of every search you conducted, every website you visited, every cell tower you passed, the content of your emails, every person you “followed”, every purchase you made, every app you used, or a comprehensive summary of the computer make and model, browser, OS, graphics processor, IP and MAC addresses… etc., you used while volunteering that information.
It was more likely than not you didn’t “google it” in 2005. Google processed a bit less than 37% of searches then. Ranked 2nd, 3rd and 4th respectively; Yahoo, MSN, and AOL handled 54%.
Now Google attracts more than 90% of internet queries. Reading more than Twitter’s 140 280 characters before concretizing your righteous outrage has become passé. Facebook has gobbled up the open discussion space by strategically monetizing polarization.
Add TikTok, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, etc. etc., and you get a cultural petri dish where narcissistic moral-superiority contests flourish, and “mean girls” of both sexes actually make a living by practicing their sociopathy.
Signaling virtuous victimhood as indicators of Dark Triad personalities, from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is a look into who powers the victimhood industrial complex.
“We show that individuals with Dark Triad traits-Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy-more frequently signal virtuous victimhood, controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables that are commonly associated with victimization in Western societies.”
A popular way to monetize victimhood is complaining about cultural appropriation. Hoop earrings, for example. As if persons of ‘Latinx’ persuasion invented hoop earrings. And, in their cultural purity, refuse to use anything invented by, say, a dead white British male. Like vaccination.
An environmental impact study would find “the better angels of our nature” an endangered species in a shrinking habitat. Gossip, maliciousness, and reputation savaging, you see, scale and can be monetized. And it works just as well if you can appropriate victimhood.
Well, this turned into more of a rant than a ‘happy anniversary to me.’ Enough.
TOC documents some bits of the last 17 years. Of topical interest, there are 109 posts tagged ‘canada’ as I write. The first is from February 25, 2005. I just tagged it. There are certainly more. Blogspot didn’t have tagging for a long time and I have only partially updated them. Now I’ll have to complete ‘Canada.’
I have made TOC’s ~2,900 posts into a ~2,100 page PDF. About 1.1 million words. Electronically signed copies can be made available. ;)
I think I managed to meet the level of Theodore Sturgeon’s adage: “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” ;)
Anyaway, here’s that first day post I mentioned above. Blogspot didn’t provide for images then, so I’m adding what I would have used.
Original inks have rotted and are replaced from web.archive.org.Saturday, February 19, 2005
Flags of our Fathers
John Bradley, Franklin Sousley, Harlon Block, Ira Hayes, Rene Gagnon and Mike Strank are the Navy corpsman and Marines who, on 23-February-1945, raised the American flag on Mount Suribachi. It’s a famous picture.
Still, Suribachi’s island wasn’t declared secure until 26-March, and it was 7-April before American fighter planes took off from the refurbished runway so many had died to secure.
Describing the Americans who fought this battle, Admiral Nimitz uttered the words that appear on the Arlington Cemetery monument to that flag raising: “Uncommon Valor was a Common Virtue”.
Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal said that “the raising of that flag on Suribachi means there will be a Marine Corps for the next 500 years.”
Thank you Marines. Semper Fi. 440 years to go; though I expect you’ve extended that a bit in the interim.
Today is the anniversary of the beginning of the death-struggle for Iwo Jima, in which over 2,000 Marines died in the first 18 hours of fighting.
In the next 36 days Marines had a casualty every 2 minutes. 6,821 Americans and over 20,000 Japanese died. Of 353 Medals of Honor awarded during WWII, 27 were given for heroism on Iwo Jima; 13 posthumously.
And this was not the end of the Pacific war. In fact, it was just the first battle on Japanese soil.
My appreciation of this battle, and my gratitude to those who fought it, grew immensely when I read a book given to me by a former Marine. That book is Flags of our Fathers, by James Bradley.
Bradley discovered that his father, a Navy corpsman who survived the battle of Iwo Jima, had not only been awarded a Navy Cross for his efforts there, but was one of the men in the famous picture of the flag raising on Mt. Suribachi. He discovered this only after his father had died, as he sorted through his father’s papers.
Danielle Girdano is another person belatedly aware of her father’s contribution on Iwo Jima.
18 year old private first class Daniel Girdano, 4th Marine Division, 24th Regiment, 1st Battalion A Company, first saw Iwo Jima’s beaches on 19-February-1945. His daughter learned what really happened there almost by accident. She bought a vial of Iwo Jima ash for her father as a Christmas present in 2003, and he could not speak of his experiences still. “He saw this vial of ash, and this man who I’ve known my entire life as the Rock of Gibraltar, broke down,” she said.
https://web.archive.org/web/20051111155604/http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/trib/westmoreland/s_303180.html
What she learned from her small gift resulted in the Legend of Heroes Memorial. A monument in glass, metal and wood; it has the faces of 10 Iwo Jima vets engraved on it. Her father is one of them. It is beginning a 49 state tour this weekend.
It is inscribed, “Boys became men, men became heroes, heroes became legends.”
I am cowed by the modesty, even self-effacement, of men like Bradley’s and Girdano’s fathers; though it is typical of those WWII vets who saw soul-wrenching combat. Part of it is certainly the modesty becoming of a different era, but I think most of it arises from the pain their experiences brought. (Note to John Kerry – your eagerness, sustained for 30 years, to capitalize on your experiences of “atrocities” in Viet Nam is one of the reasons you were not credible.)
I recommend Flags of our Fathers, but for a brief tour you should read Arthur Herman’s piece at:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060207155223/http://opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006317
Herman also invokes contemporary issues via a perspective on the doubt and debate surrounding WWII strategies that most of us now think of as uncontroversial.
# posted by Hershblogger @ 2/19/2005 06:46:00 PM
Chinese regulators call on gaming companies to protect kids’ physical, mental health
China is concerned about Chinese children’s exposure to Chinese social media apps like TikTok…
TikTok Faces EU Data Probes Into Children’s Safety, China Link
Bloomberg, Sep 14
How TikTok Serves Up Sex and Drug Videos to Minors
WSJ (paywall), Sep 8
Alternate sites here, summary; and here, archive.
…then maybe we should be concerned about our kids exposure to it, too. As well as exposure to our own ‘social’ media.
Facebook under more scrutiny after own research shows Instagram is harmful to teens
CNet, Sep 15
