Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Twitter
2. Riots
3. Salmon
4. Apple
5. Tech
6. Maricopa
7. Brinton
8. Snow
1. Twitter. Big story of the week was release of documents demonstrating Twitter’s collusion with the Biden campaign and congressional democrats to suppress the Hunter Laptop story in the months before the Nov 2020 elections. Matt Taibbi posted a 33-tweet string on Dec 2 that detailed the information Musk released from Twitter. It is important to know how Twitter got from a platform designed to create and share ideas and info instantly without barriers into the democrat censorship machine it became. It started out well, but over time it was forced to add tools for controlling speech, mostly in response to spam and fraudsters. Over time, management and staff began finding more uses for those tools. Outsiders started petitioning the company to manipulate speech, first a little bit, then constantly. As most employees and execs were democrats, democrats from outside had many more avenues for these requests than anyone else. They got heard and handled. The entire system depended on contacts. While both sides had access, there were more channels open to the left than the right which by definition slanted moderation. Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the laptop story, using tools reserved for extreme cases like child porn. The trust and safety team eventually seized upon a policy against posting hacked materials as their excuse to suppress the laptop story prompting an ongoing, rollicking internal argument between trust / safety and comm / policy teams. Note that the partisans in the intel community helped push this noodle along by calling the laptop story Russian disinformation, giving trust / safety their excuse to ramp up their censorship. All of this was done without the knowledge of Twitter CEO Dorsey until the end when he tried to unwind the censorship. By then, it was too late, as the election had been mostly cast in stone. Most of the censorship decisions were made by trust / safety head Vijaya Gadde. At least one congressional democrat (only one) expressed concern about Twitter censorship violating freedom of the press. Gadde responded with a discussion about Twitter policy. Other congressional democrats wanted more moderation, more censorship, concerned the laptop story got as far as it did. This is not over, as the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) sneaking its way through the lame duck is aimed at more censorship by Big Tech rather than less. These internal discussions between Twitter, the Biden campaign, congressional democrats, and other fellow travelers further serve to undercut any defense of Twitter (and other social media corporations) that their actions were the actions of private corporations. When corporations do the bidding of their political masters, they are no longer private. They become defacto arms of the government, begging to be regulated as common carrier utilities, something that is coming their direction like a freight train.
2. Riots. Riots in both China and Iran continued last week, threatening the continuation of both regimes. The Chinese riots are in response to President Xi’s zero COVID lockdowns. The riots in Iran are in response to harsh suppression of protesters by the Iranian Republican Guard. China watchers believe these riots are as (or more) dangerous to the CCP than the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. The zero COVID policies include some really nasty actions by Chinese police and military against the citizens. These include welding doors of apartment buildings shut, starving those inside. There are also isolation camps, where people (and children) are removed from their homes and locked up. When you have a totalitarian state, those tools are too inviting not to use, not unlike what we saw Justin Trudeau use in Canada during the truckers’ strike. Trudeau, who cracked down on truckers ironically tweeted support for the Chinese protesters citing the right of all people (other than Canadian truckers and their supporters) to protest. The Canadian protests were also in response to insane anti-COVID policies. Apple, having a bad week as they thought about taking on Elon Musk and the new Twitter (more on that later), participated in the festivities by turning off Air Drop in China, an iPhone app that allows users to share files, locations and other info between devices without using WiFi or cellular data. Protesters were brilliantly using Air Drop to coordinate protests much to the displeasure of the CCP. Things are far enough along that neighboring communist regimes, like the one in Vietnam, are getting worried. In Iran, protests are serious enough that the regime has at least made noises about rolling back one or two of their policies at least a notch. And they don’t move unless they are worried. Last thought. I am somewhat mystified that the CCP is pushing the zero COVID policy so hard. Not surprised at the brutality, for it is what totalitarian regimes do. But zero COVID is really trashing the Chinese economy, up to 40% decrease in economic activity due to one report last week. I suspect part of it is Xi’s (and along with him the greater CCP’s) zero infallibility worldview. If they back off, they self-identify as capable of making mistakes, leading to an enormous loss of face, eventually power. Biden is being handed a series of foreign policy victories, the destruction of the Russian military and economy in Ukraine, the destruction of the Chinese economy and the CCP in China due to zero COVID, and the Iranian mullahs in Iran due to their own ugliness. The only one of these he is supporting is Ukraine. He is trying to be friendly with both the CCP and the mullahs, so neither he nor his handlers are doing anything to help those protesters, something they will regret.
3. Salmon. The Great Reset crowd want those of us in the prole community to transition to eating bugs, while they continue to eat Wagyu Beef, technology continues to roll on. The latest story comes courtesy Craig Medred, one of our local bloggers, who dropped a story about Upside Foods, a Berkeley based company that just got a FDA approval to produce meat from cultured chicken cells. The company has plans for meat and seafood products as well. A month ago, another Cali firm, BlueNau announced it had cracked the code for economically viable production of cultured seafood. They are focusing on bluefin tuna. Wildtype, a third Cali company is farther along, already taste testing sushi-grade salmon. Alaskan commercial fishermen (commfish) adopted a protectionist approach to innovative changes in the production of salmon for the worldwide marketplace. They managed to ban fish farming in Alaska in the early 1990s ostensibly to protect commercial fishermen from that sort of competition. The ban only protected Alaskan commfish from learning how to compete in the worldwide marketplace for salmon. Today farmed salmon is over 75% of all salmon sold worldwide. And the fish farmers are getting creative, with AquaBounty figuring out how to grow a genetically modified salmon that is sterile (can’t breed) and capable of growing 70% faster with 25% less feed. Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski has referred to this as “frankenfish”, tilting at this windmill like Don Quixote tilted at giants pretending to be windmills. While it is sad to see an entire industry ground into dust, it is not sad to see them get what they wanted and get it good and hard. My only hope is that they are done before they strip all fish from Alaskan rivers and streams on their futile way down, not unlike a drowning man.
4. Apple. As I noted earlier, Apple had themselves a rough week, mostly actions of their own making. Cancel culture has been trying to figure how to damage Elon Musk’s Twitter 2.0 for dropping their censorship operation. They managed to get a large swath of Twitter’s advertisers to quit, even after making a deal with Musk to set up a review committee for the issues. In return for the cancel culture leaving Twitter advertisers alone, Musk was to set up the new body. The cancelers reneged; Musk called them out. Latest round of this was a very real effort to get Twitter banned from the Apple and Google app stores. Musk announced this a week ago. Both Apple and Google need to be very careful with this, as a properly motivated Musk can destroy their smart phone businesses. How so? Today, smart phones essentially exist to run apps. And there are a lot of apps. Cost for a new cell phone is upwards of $1,000 a pop. What if that personalized information was held on servers rather than locally? A Generation II smart phone could be sold for $100. Do a face scan, and it installs operating system tied to your profile onto the new device. This would destroy both Apple’s and Google’s smart phone business in very short order. Apparently, Apple understands this, as late last week, Musk met with Tim Cook of Apple and came to an agreement that Twitter was going to remain in the Apple app store. The blacklist threat was a misunderstanding. No announcement by Google as yet, though I don’t think they want any part of that action either.
5. Tech. The ongoing stock market crash has wiped out $7.4 trillion in valuation in the NASDAQ stock index. Since its peak a year ago, Microsoft is down $700 billion. Meta is down 70%, $600 billion in value. IPOs are also down significantly. Both the Elliot Wave guys, and the Singularity guys are predicting a hard down stock market for the next couple / few years. The astounding thing to me is that both groups came to their conclusions via completely different paths. Buckle up. It’s gonna be a rough ride for a while.
6. Maricopa. Looks like Ground Zero for election fraud this year is Maricopa County, AZ. The trick appears to leverage printer and voting machine technical issues into blatant voter suppression. As with other blue states, there is a heavy early voting contingent, with mostly democrats participating. Republicans turned out en masse on election day, stood in long lines, and were met with machines that didn’t work, though they reportedly worked the day before in tests. Printers in a third of election sites printed ballots that were rejected by the tabulation machines. Expect this to end up once again in court, as Maricopa County refused to cooperate with the state legislature following the festivities of 2020. Note also that AZ Governor-elect Katie Hobbs was in charge of the elections. Once again, Republicans for the most part refused to participate in early voting. Perhaps it is time to reconsider this strategy.
7. Brinton. The woke freak show that calls itself the Biden administration once again demonstrates that hiring people based on physical characteristics rather than actual competence is generally a failure. How many people have been put into positions based on race, sex, sexual orientation rather than their ability to get the job done? Examples are endless. Kamala Harris was selected as VP because she was a black woman. She is so incompetent that democrats don’t look like they can force Biden out of office for being senile because Harris will be worse. Ketanji Brown was nominated for the SCOTUS because she is a black woman. Likewise with Press Secretary Karine Jean – Pierre was selected because she is a black, lesbian woman. Richard Levine was selected as DHHS Assistant Secretary for Health because he transitioned to a woman. Likewise, Sam Brinton, a cross-dressing “openly genderfluid” MIT grad appointed as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Office of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition. Brinton went through MSP Sept 16 and grabbed a suitcase that wasn’t his. The owner filed a claim for over $2,300 for the bag. He checked the bag in for his return flight to DC two days later. Brinton had not checked any baggage for his flight to MSP. One of the things Brinton either doesn’t know about or has forgotten is that there are cameras everywhere in airports. There is video of him grabbing the bag and leaving quickly from baggage claim in MSP. There is video of his checking the bag in back to DC two days later. His trial date is Dec 19. I wonder if he will retain his clearance after being convicted of felony theft. Brinton also has an Alaskan connection, having coordinated with the Anchorage Assembly on an anti-transition therapy ordinance a few years ago. This boy gets around.
8. Snow. Winter’s coming. Snow extent in the Northern Hemisphere at the end of Nov is the highest coverage in 56 years. This increases the likelihood of a cold, early winter for the rest of the winter in both North America and Europe. Just in time for a natural gas shortage. Plan accordingly. I thought there wasn’t supposed to be any more snow. Perhaps I was confused.
More later –
– AG