Quotulatiousness

August 13, 2023

Don’t worry about losing all your news links, citizen! The Liberal government’s Ministry of Propaganda will tell you everything you need to know!

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The federal government still seems shocked and a little bit hurt that the “tech giants” are carefully obeying the letter of their new Online News Act instead of pumping millions of dollars into government-favoured media outlets. How dare Alphabet and Meta obey the law we wrote? We wanted to soak them for bribes subsidies to give to legacy corporations who can be depended upon to cheerlead our agenda!

Blocking of news links on Facebook and Instagram in Canada has becomes increasingly widespread in recent days, leading to a growing number of public comments from media outlets and reporters expressing surprise or shock about the scope of the link blocking. Indeed, outlets with blocked links include university student newspapers, radio stations, and foreign news outlets. While there may have been some errors (Facebook has a page to seek review of any blocked link decision), the inclusion of a very wide range of Canadian and foreign news outlets is no accident. Rather, it reflects the government’s Bill C-18 approach, which effectively covers all news outlets worldwide whose links are accessed in Canada. The Canadian government could have adopted a more targeted approach – for example, limiting the scope to news links from those news outlets eligible to negotiate agreements with Internet platforms under the law – but it instead went for the broadest possible approach that includes foreign news outlets with little or no connection to Canada.

Understanding why Bill C-18 covers news links from outlets who are not “eligible news businesses” under the law requires unpacking several provisions. First, start with the definition of a “digital news intermediary”, which states:

    digital news intermediary means an online communications platform, including a search engine or social media service, that is subject to the legislative authority of Parliament and that makes news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada. It does not include an online communications platform that is a messaging service the primary purpose of which is to allow persons to communicate with each other privately.‍ 

This definition is critical since the only companies that are subject to Bill C-18’s requirement to negotiate agreements with news outlets are (1) those that qualify as DNIs under this definition and (2) meet the requirements found in Section 6 on a significant bargaining power imbalance. The absence of significant bargaining power imbalance is why companies such as Twitter, Microsoft or Apple are not subject to the law. That leaves Google and Meta, provided that they qualify as DNIs. The key phrase in the qualification requirement is that the companies “make news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada”. If the companies do not make news content produced by news outlets available to persons in Canada they are not DNIs and are not subject to the law.

[…]

… the government’s choice was to try to bring Meta and Google into the scope of the law by virtue of any news links to any news outlet anywhere in the world, even if those outlets have nothing to do with Canada or with the Bill C-18 system. Given Meta’s stated goal of complying with Bill C-18 by removing links to news content that would render it a DNI, the government’s legislative choice of covering all news links from all news outlets therefore effectively requires it to block all of those news links.

It takes a lot to make Google, of all companies, a sympathetic victim … yet Canada’s awesomely awful Liberal government aced it. Bananada strikes again!

“It makes [Canada] look like some cheap, politically petty little kleptocracy run by a collection of self-serving narcissists”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Canada became a parody of itself so slowly that the legacy media barely even noticed:

There was a time when politicians steered very carefully around saying anything that could be construed as an attempt to influence a decision by one of Canada’s independent agencies.

Honest, there was.

There was also a time when, should a politician so much as nod or wink publicly to indicate a preferred outcome by, say, the office of the Commissioner for Competition, the nation’s leading media organizations would see this as a big story. Sixteen dollar orange juice big. Heads would roll.

Seriously, there was.

The reasons people like Francois-Phillipe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development are supposed to keep their yaps shut are pretty straightforward. Businesses, citizens, consumers, and investors need to know the processes at law enforcement agencies and regulators — such as the Competition Bureau and the CRTC respectively — are independent of the sordid manipulations of partisanship. They need to be able to trust that the rules are clear, their application is consistent and that they can have faith that the institution involved views matters before it in an objective fashion.

It’s Rule of Law 101 stuff and messing with it makes Canada look like something less than a first world country. It makes us look like some cheap, politically petty little kleptocracy run by a collection of self-serving narcissists.

Shortly after the CBC, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters and News Media Canada filed a complaint with the Competition Bureau over Meta’s decision to no longer carry news in Canada, Champagne seized the opportunity to show Big Tech who their daddy is.

“I am determined to use every tool at our disposal to ensure that Canadians can have access to reliable news — across all platforms,” Champagne posted on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter). “I fully support the complaint made to the Competition Bureau by Cnd media groups against Meta in their effort to promote a free & independent press.”

I don’t expect that many readers have hung around with cabinet appointees. But I have, and I’ve been one. And I can tell you that most of them — particularly the ones whose conditions of appointment mean they serve “at pleasure” as Competition Commissioner Matthew Boswell does — pay attention when the minister through whom their agency reports to Parliament, says anything, let alone things like that.

August 10, 2023

“Forget global boiling … It’s global gaslighting we should be worried about”

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Remember when [your local TV station/newspaper] was blaring the alarming news that your [city/town/state/province] was warming at twice the rate of everything else? All the legacy media NPCs got the same patch at the same time — and it was blatant enough that most people realized it was utter bullshit. As Brendan O’Neill explains, they’re not normally quite so clumsy in their constant attempts to gaslight us all about the climate, but they’re definitely still doing it:

Picture the scene. You’re in London, the sky is menacingly grey, it’s drizzling. You zip your jacket against the elements, annoyed that Britain has just had one of its wettest Julys since records began. Then you reach for your copy of the Evening Standard as you head home from work, only to see splashed across the front page a Photoshopped image of the Earth on fire. “WHO WILL STOP EARTH BURNING?”, the hysterical headline asks. The drizzle turns to rain and you fold your Standard in two to use as an impromptu umbrella, turning a mad piece of global-boiling propaganda into flimsy protection from this strange, wet summer.

This was London yesterday. It really happened. It was yet another overcast day, in keeping with the record-breaking precipitation of the past month. The UK had an average of 140.1mm of rain in July, the sixth-highest level of July rainfall since records were first kept in 1836. And yet here was the freebie London paper warning us that flames will shortly engulf our celestial home. That heat death is coming. That an inferno of our own dumb making is licking at our feet. I know we live in mad times but even I never expected to see damp commuters brushing raindrops off their shoulders while surrounded by discarded papers telling us it’s so hellishly hot we might all soon die. Rarely has the gap between MSM BS and real life felt so cavernously vast.

They’re lying to us. Forget global boiling, the crazy term invented by UN chief António Guterres a couple of weeks ago. Forget global warming, even. It’s global gaslighting we should be worried about. If gaslighting, in the words of the Oxford dictionary, is “the process of making somebody believe untrue things in order to control them”, then that lunatic Standard cover was classic gaslighting. The planet is not on fire. Earth is not burning. These are untruths. This is delirium, not journalism; fearmongering, not fact-gathering. And the aim, it seems to me, is to try to control us; to frighten us with pseudo-Biblical prophesies of hellfire and doom until we obediently bow down to the eco-ideology.

Adding insult to injury, the Standard frontpage had pics of Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and Rishi Sunak next to its crackpot query, “WHO WILL STOP EARTH BURNING?”. Let’s leave to one side that President Biden doesn’t seem to know what planet he’s on half the time, never mind being able to save one; and that Rishi can’t even control Britain’s borders, far less the climate of our entire mortal coil; and that Xi and Modi are surely more concerned with their pursuit of economic development than with indulging the End Times hysteria of the Notting Hill set that writes and publishes the Standard. The more pressing point is this: no one needs to stop Earth from burning because Earth isn’t burning. You can’t put out a fire that doesn’t exist. As Bjorn Lomborg said last week, the idea that the “world is ablaze” is pure bunkum.

August 9, 2023

“Soon, they say, white America will be over”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Oxford Sour, Christopher Gage considers the prominent media narrative about the inevitability of a “majority-minority” America within the next twenty years:

According to both the Daily Stormer and the Washington Post‘s Jennifer Rubin, white people will be a minority sometime in the 2040s.

In 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau projected that “non-Hispanic” white Americans would fall to 49 percent by the year 2042.

Since then, breathless media-politicos have taken the coming “majority-minority” as gospel. Some on the left celebrate the forthcoming date as the first day of their permanent dominance. Some on the right employ the doomsday date to encourage lunatics to rub out innocent people in a synagogue.

The 2020 census continued the theme. Breathless, lazy journalists took the clickbait. Ominously, they said the white population was “shrinking”. According to the Census Bureau, the white population shrunk to just 57.8 percent. Michael Moore did a little dance.

On white nationalist forums, users with names like WhiteGenocide88 were traumatised, and tooling up for war. No doubt, there are a few Robert Bowers with monstrous campaigns lurking around their skulls.

The problem with this theory, or so my Jewish puppet masters instruct me to say, is that it’s nonsense.

Firstly, the white population didn’t “shrink”. Not unless one believes the Jim Crow “one-drop” rule meaning one non-white ancestor renders one non-white. Secondly, the census ignores millions of white Americans who check the “Hispanic” box. These Americans more than cover any white decline.

According to the census, only those of one hundred percent white European ancestry are white. The Ku Klux Klan tends to agree.

For the first time on the census form, white people could include their varied multi-racial ancestry. Over 31 million whites did so. When we count these white people as white, the white population climbs to 71 percent. So, rather than “shrinking”, the white population has since 2010 increased by four million.

With a sensible definition of white, even by 2060, America remains around 70 percent white.

Professor Richard Alba, a sociologist at the City University of New York, says that definition means America remains a majority-white nation indefinitely — no doomsday clock, no murderous rampages, no primitive bloodsport over a faulty horoscope.

I’m no demographer but counting all white people as white people means there are more white people. I’m no sociologist either but revealing the increase in white people means fewer Robert Bowers keen to pump shotgun rounds into human flesh.

At Not the Bee, Joel Abbott is concerned about the obvious glee displayed by legacy media folks when they push the “replacement” story line:

You can practically feel the excitement here from the quivering fingers of the journalist that wrote this.

Ah.

Hmm.

Well, this is awkward.

See, I’m told this isn’t happening. White people aren’t being “replaced,” they’re just simply being phased out with a percentage that isn’t white at the same time all our institutions, companies, and leaders are pushing to eradicate things like “whiteness” and “white rage” in the name of equity.

For the record, I really couldn’t care less about the skin color of who lives in America. I care an infinite amount more about the spiritual worldview and values of my neighbor than whether their physical DNA gave them dark skin, blue eyes, or a big nose.

This is why I find it weird that the media keeps reporting, with abject glee, that people who look like me will be in the minority soon.

August 8, 2023

Holding the BBC to account for their climate change alarmism

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Paul Homewood‘s updated accounting of the BBC’s coverage — and blatant falsehoods — of climate change news over the last twelve months:

The BBC’s coverage of climate change and related policy issues, such as energy policy, has long been of serious and widespread concern. There have been numerous instances of factual errors, bias and omission of alternative views to the BBC’s narrative. Our 2022 paper, Institutional Alarmism, provided many examples. Some led to formal complaints, later upheld by the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit. However, many programmes and articles escaped such attention, though they were equally biased and misleading.

The purpose of this paper is to update that previous analysis with further instances of factual errors, misinformation, half truths, omissions and sheer bias. These either post-date the original report or were not included previously. However, the list is still by no means complete.

The case for the prosecution

The third most active hurricane season
In December 2021, BBC News reported that “The 2021 Atlantic hurricane season has now officially ended, and it’s been the third most active on record”. It was nothing of the sort. There were seven Atlantic hurricanes in 2021, and since 1851 there have been 32 years with a higher count. The article also made great play of the fact that all of the pre-determined names had been used up, implying that hurricanes are becoming more common. They failed to explain, however, that with satellite technology we are now able to spot hurricanes in mid-ocean that would have been missed before.

Hurricanes: are they getting more violent?
Shortly after Hurricane Ian in September 2022, a BBC “Reality Check” claimed that “Hurricanes are among the most violent storms on Earth and there’s evidence they’re getting more powerful”. The video offered absolutely no data or evidence to back up this claim, which contradicted the official agencies. For instance, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) state in their latest review:

    There is no strong evidence of century-scale increasing trends in U.S. landfalling hurricanes or major hurricanes. Similarly for Atlantic basin-wide hurricane frequency (after adjusting for observing capabilities), there is not strong evidence for an increase since the late 1800s in hurricanes, major hurricanes, or the proportion of hurricanes that reach major hurricane intensity.

The IPCC came to a similar conclusion about hurricanes globally in their latest Assessment Review. However, the BBC article failed to mention any of this.

August 7, 2023

Legacy media puzzled at falling levels of public trust in the scientific community

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Given the way “the science” has been politicized over recent years and especially through the pandemic, it’s almost a surprise that there’s any residual public trust left for the scientific community:

Sagan’s warning was eerily prophetic. For the last three-plus years, we’ve witnessed a troubling rise of authoritarianism masquerading as science, which has resulted in a collapse in trust of public health.

This collapse has been part of a broader and more partisan shift in Americans who say they have “a high degree of confidence in the scientific community”. Democrats, who had long had less confidence in the scientific community, are now far less skeptical. Republicans, who historically had much higher levels of trust in the scientific community, have experienced a collapse in trust in the scientific community.

John Burn-Murdoch, a data reporter at The Financial Times who shared the data in question on Twitter, said Republicans are now “essentially the anti-science party”.

First, this is a sloppy inference from a journalist. Burn-Murdoch’s poll isn’t asking respondents if they trust science. It’s asking if they trust the scientific community. There’s an enormous difference between the two, and the fact that a journalist doesn’t understand the difference between “confidence in science” and “confidence in the scientific community” is a little frightening.

Second, as Dr. Vinay Prasad pointed out, no party has a monopoly on science; but it’s clear that many of the policies the “pro science” party were advocating the last three years were not rooted in science.

“The ‘pro science’ party was pro school closure, masking a 26 month old child with a cloth mask, and mandating an mrna booster in a healthy college man who had COVID already,” tweeted Prasad, a physician at the University of California, San Francisco.

Today we can admit such policies were flawed, non-sensical or both, as were so many of the mitigations that were taken and mandated during the Covid-19 pandemic. But many forget that during the pandemic it was verboten to even question such policies.

People were banned, suspended, and censored by social media platforms at the behest of federal agencies. “The Science” had become a set of dogmas that could not be questioned. No less an authority than Dr. Fauci said that criticizing his policies was akin to “criticizing science, because I represent science”.

This could not be more wrong. Science can help us understand the natural world, but there are no “oughts” in science, the economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out, echoing the argument of philosopher David Hume.

“Science is competent to establish what is,” Mises wrote. “[Science] can never dictate what ought to be and what ends people should aim at.”

UN Secretary General updates Dante’s Inferno

Filed under: Environment, Media, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sean Walsh on the differences between the lowest level of Hell as described by Dante and the UN Secretary General’s modern characterization:

Source: Jerome, Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell, Daily Infographic, August 27, 2017, http://www.dailyinfographic.com/dantes-nine-circles-of-hell

    “In the tide of time there have only been four absolutely fundamental physical theories: Newtonian mechanics; Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism; Einstein’s theory of relativity, and quantum mechanics” – David Berlinski, The Deniable Darwin

In Dante’s Inferno, Hell is, counter-intuitively perhaps, freezing cold. In the 9th Circle the Devil is entrapped in a lake of ice. An imaginative inversion of what we normally take Hell to be.

Clearly the 14th century Italian poet didn’t get the memo from UN secretary general Antonio Guterres, for whom the Hell we currently suffer is boiling hot. Or if he did get it, perhaps he binned it. I wouldn’t blame him.

There is, of course, another difference between the two Hells: in Dante’s conception you know you’re in it; in Guterres’s diagnosis you need to be told you are. Some “Hell” that is.

I jest of course. Guterres claim is not that we are currently in Hell, more that we are on the road to it. And that the diesel-fuelled vehicle we are travelling in is called “complacency”: a stubborn and bewildering refusal on the part of you and me to recalibrate, or rather abandon, our lives in accordance with the instructions of “settled science”. An inexplicable refusal to genuflect at the altar of the Climate Change Sanhedrin.

You’ll notice that we have been here before. Restrictions imposed during the “Covid pandemic” were also justified on the grounds of an alleged scientific consensus. It’s tempting, perhaps even irresistible, to think that lockdown was the rehearsal and that incoming climate-related restrictions (and they are incoming) the main event. An amplification of the tyranny. A bit like when a thug tries his hand at assault before graduating to murder.

It’s easy to establish a consensus when the grown-ups are excluded from the discussion. And such a consensus is not really worth the candle. In fact, it is normally injurious to a genuine search for truth.

I refer you to the quotation at the top of the piece. For context: David Berlinski is a polymath who has taught philosophy, mathematics and English at universities including Columbia and Princeton. He’s the real deal and a genuine maverick whose genius is confirmed by the fact that he’s been sacked from every academic position he’s ever held.

The four foundational theories he references were in the main constructed by geniuses whose creativity was enabled precisely by their cultivated indifference to the “settled science” of the day.

August 6, 2023

What’s in a (tech) name?

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia isn’t a fan of all the recent rebrandings of social media platforms, and tries to explain “why web platforms keep changing their names like criminals in the Witness Protection Program”:

“Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0

When I first heard that Twitter was renaming itself as X, I thought it was a joke.

Not a funny joke, just a goofy one. Elon Musk has a taste for schoolboy humor — and on many occasions has posted something undignified for a laugh. I assumed X was another example of this.

Who could take that name seriously?

Just consider the significations of X:

  • The crossbones you put in front of a skull on a bottle of poison;
  • A mistake on a test, marked by the teacher in red;
  • How you sign your name if you can’t read or write;
  • Something you haven’t figured out in algebra;
  • A movie that’s dirty, raunchy, or offensive in some manner;
  • A mark on a map where stolen wealth has been buried by pirates or criminals;
  • The street name for an illegal drug (MDMA) with various adverse long-term effects — including depression, anxiety, and impairments of cognition, memory, and learning;
  • A symbol of betrayal (i.e., a double cross);
  • In marketing language, an inferior product, as in “Brand X”;
  • A radioactive ray so dangerous that it killed the people who invented and developed it.

Given these associations, nobody in their right mind would replace a familiar, proven brand name with X. Mr. Musk must be joking again. Or so I thought.

But I thought wrong.

If this were an isolated event, I would dismiss it as just one more quirk on the part of an eccentric CEO. But these horrible rebrands are now standard practice in Silicon Valley, especially among dominant Internet platforms.

Why did Google change its corporate name to Alphabet? Why did Facebook change its corporate name to Meta? These were two of the best known brand names in the history of capitalism. Why get rid of them?

And consider this bizarre coincidence. The very same month that Twitter became X, Instagram launched its own text posting option. But it refused to use the familiar Instagram name, instead calling this new feature Threads.

Threads is another word that has all sorts of negative connotations. It refers to something old and torn. It’s associated with poverty and an embarrassing appearance.

What gives?

Do you remember the carefree early days of the web? Brand names were innocent and playful — they sounded like something from a nursery rhyme: Yahoo, Google, Tumblr. Twitter was one of those cutesy names.

Its symbol was a chirping bird. So sweet. So innocent.

But nowadays, web platforms take on names straight out of an H.P. Lovecraft horror story — Threads, X, Ghost, Twitch, Discord, etc.

Today’s writing prompt: Use all of those words in the opening lines of a story. Then send it off to an editor at Weird Tales.

Current day techno bro vibe

August 5, 2023

In the “New World Order”, China was expected to become more democratic. Instead, the west is rapidly becoming more like China

Filed under: China, Europe, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

N.S. Lyons discusses the unhappy convergence of Communist China with the post-democratic western world, led by the United States:

Differences and tensions between the United States and China have never been greater. The whole world is dividing itself between the blocs of these two opposing superpowers. A new Cold War is dawning, complete with a global ideological “battle between democracy and autocracy“. Freedom is on the line. The future of global governance will be determined by the winner of this extended competition between two fundamentally opposed political and economic systems – unless a hot war settles the question early with a cataclysmic fight to the death, much as liberal democracy once fought off fascism.

This is the simple and easy narrative of our present moment. In some ways it is accurate: a geopolitical competition really is in the process of boiling over into open confrontation. But it’s also fundamentally shallow and misleading: when it comes to the most fundamental political questions, China and the United States are not diverging but converging to become more alike.

In fact, I can already predict and describe the winner set to prevail in this epochal competition between these two fiercely opposed national systems. In this soon-to-be triumphant system …

Despite a rhetorical commitment to egalitarianism and “democracy”, the elite class deeply distrusts and fears the people over whom it rules. These elites have concentrated themselves into a separate oligarchic political body focused on prioritizing and preserving their rule and their own overlapping set of shared interests. Wracked by anxiety, they strive constantly to maximize their control over the masses, rationalizing a need to forcefully maintain stability in the face of dangerous threats, foreign and domestic. Everything is treated as an emergency. “Safety” and “security” have become be the watchwords of the state, and of society generally.

This elite obsession with control is accelerated by a belief in “scientific management”, or the ability to understand, organize, and run all the complex systems of society like a machine, through scientific principles and technologies. The expert knowledge of how to do so is considered the unique and proprietary possession of the elite vanguard. Ideologically, this elite is deeply materialist, and openly hostile to organized religion, which inhibits and resists state control. They view human beings themselves as machines to be programmed, and, believing the common man to be an unpredictable creature too stupid, irrational, and violent to rule himself, they endeavor to steadily condition and replace him with a better model through engineering, whether social or biological. Complex systems of surveillance, propaganda, and coercion are implemented to help firmly nudge (or shove) the common man into line. Communities and cultural traditions that resist this project are dismantled. Harmfully contrary ideas are systematically censored, lest they lead to dangerous exposure. Governing power has been steadily elevated, centralized, and distributed to a technocratic bureaucracy unconstrained by any accountability to the public.

All of this is justified by a utopian ideological dialectic of historical progress and inevitability. Those more in tune with the tide of history (i.e. elite interests) are held to be morally and intellectually superior, as a class, to backwards reactionary elements. Only certain views are stamped “scientific” and “correct,” although these may change on a political whim. An economism that values only the easily quantifiable reigns as the only moral lodestar, and frictionless efficiency is held up as highest common good; the individual is encouraged to fulfill his assigned role as a docile consumer and cog in the regime’s machine, not that of a self-governing citizen. The state regularly acts to stimulate and manage consumer demand, and to strategically regulate and guide industrial production, and the corporate sector has largely fused itself with the state. Cronyism is rampant.

The relentless political messaging and ideological narrative has come to suffuse every sphere of life, and dissent is policed. Culture is largely stagnant. Uprooted, corralled, and hounded, the people are atomized, and social trust is very low. Reality itself often feels obscured and uncertain. Demoralized, some gratefully accept any security offered by the state as a blessing. At the same time, many citizens automatically assume everything the regime says is a lie. Officialdom in general is a Kafkaesque tragi-comedy of the absurd, something only to be stoically endured by normal people. Yet year by year the pressure to conform only continues to be ratcheted higher…

Which country does this describe? If you can’t quite tell, well, that’s the point. For many citizens of the West, the systems of governance under which we live increasingly feel uncomfortably similar to what appears offer in the People’s Republic of China.

August 4, 2023

Vivek Ramaswamy as “Trump 2.0”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Bari Weiss considers Vivek Ramaswamy as an improved version of Donald Trump, appealing to a similar audience but with less obvious baggage. Here are some excerpts from her recent interview with Ramaswamy:

Vivek Ramaswamy and his family.
Detail of a photo from his campaign website, https://www.vivekramaswamy.com/

BW: Politics is all about storytelling, and the winning candidate — or the candidate that catches fire — is almost always the one with the best story. What is your story, and why is it the story that Americans are craving right now?

VR: Whether Americans are craving it or not, that’ll be for them to decide. But I’ll tell you what my story is. I’m the embodiment of the American dream. My parents came to this country over 40 years ago with almost no money. I’ve gone on to found multibillion-dollar companies that created value by doing valuable things for other people, developing five medicines that are FDA approved today. One of them is a life-saving therapy for kids, another one for prostate cancer. I did it while getting married, while bringing two sons into this world, while following my faith in God, while growing up with the ultimate privilege in this country. And I think the thing that’s extraordinary about that story is that it isn’t extraordinary. It is the story of this country. And I don’t think we’re in decline. I think we are still a nation in our ascent, in the early stages of our ascent actually, a nation whose best days are still ahead. I think it takes someone in my shoes to see our nation that way, too. That’s truly what pulled me into the race.

BW: There’s a lot of people running on a reformist platform. You’re running on a radical or a revolutionary one. You say America needs a second revolution. Many people hear revolution, and they think bloodshed and violence. What do you mean by that, and what does that revolution look like?

VR: To me, it does not mean bloodshed and violence, but it means a revival of the ideals that set this nation into motion in 1776. I do think we live in a 1776 moment. I think that the American bargain was built on the idea that we, the people, determine how we settle our political differences through free speech and open debate in the public square where every person’s voice and vote counts equally. That is self-governance. And I think that there is the Old World vision now rearing its head in multiple forms that says, no, we the people cannot be trusted. The citizens of a nation cannot be trusted to determine what’s actually good for them — so we, the intelligentsia, must make that determination centrally at large. I stand on the side of the American Revolution, the ideals that birthed this nation. I think we live in a moment where we have to confront those radical ideals. I think that the American ideals are very fundamentally radical ideals: self-governance, free speech, like absolute free speech, the idea that you get ahead through unbridled meritocracy, the unbridled pursuit of excellence, the steadfast commitment to the rule of law rather than the whims of men. These are radical ideals, because for most of human history, it was done the other way. I think it is the radicalism of the American Revolution and those ideals that are our last best chance for national unity, because that is what actually binds us together across our diverse attributes. And without embracing that radicalism, I think we’re nothing.

BW: You’re incredibly entertaining. You have a view on everything. You’re a phenomenal talker, which will take you far. And remarkably, as of the latest polls, you’re third behind Trump and DeSantis. But many commentators say that ultimately, you have no shot at the nomination. Why is that conventional wisdom wrong about you?

VR: Everyone seems to be shocked where I am right now. I’m not surprised. This is exactly where we expected to be. The reality is, I think people are hungry for the unfiltered truth. I would rather speak the truth about my own beliefs at every step and lose the election than to play some political Snakes and Ladders. And I believe that our voters across this country have a good sixth sense for being able to tell the difference for somebody who’s actually sharing their true beliefs versus somebody who’s giving them carefully constructed, poll-tested slogans. And that is the competitive advantage. My gut instinct is we’re going to win this election. We’re going to win it in a landslide of a margin similar to what Reagan delivered in 1980.

BW: So you’re going to be the Obama of this race, not the Andrew Yang?

VR: I’m going to be the Vivek Ramaswamy of this race, and that’s what I’m committed to being.

At 7% in the polls at the moment, Ramaswamy is a long-shot to win the Republican nomination, but you’ll know if his chances are improving when the media slow-walks the Bad Orange Man stories and starts criticizing Ramaswamy (or “Bad Curry Man” as some online wits have dubbed him).

August 3, 2023

“Tech giants” obey the law and block access to Canadian news sites to Canadian users

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

For some reason — despite a clamour of warnings from sensible observers — the Canadian government still seems shocked and surprised that the much-reviled “tech giants” have chosen to obey the new Online News Act and are actively blocking links to Canadian media outlets just as the law requires:

For months, supporters of Bill C-18, the Online News Act, assured the government that Meta and Google were bluffing when they warned that a bill based on mandated payments for links was unworkable and they would comply with it by removing links to news from their platforms. However, what has been readily apparent for months became reality yesterday: Meta is now actively blocking news links and sharing on its Facebook and Instagram platforms. The announcement does not reference Threads, but it would not surprise if news links are ultimately blocked on that platform as well. The company says that the blocking will take several weeks to fully roll out to all users, suggesting that it has learned from the over-blocking mistakes made in Australia and is proceeding more cautiously in Canada. By the end of the month, the world’s largest social media platform will become a news desert in Canada, with links to all news – both Canadian and foreign – blocked on the platform.

It is worth revisiting that it was only a couple of months ago that some industry leaders, lobbyists, and academics were assuring the Senate that the Meta threat was just a bluff. Kevin Desjardins of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, referenced the Australian experience, and told the Senate committee studying the bill that “when legislated to do so, they will come to the table”. Sylvain Poisson of Hebdos Quebec confidently said “they made those threats in Australia and elsewhere and every time they back down”. Chris Pedigo of the U.S.-based Digital Context Next assured the committee “it’s important to understand what happens when these bills become law. In Australia, they moved quickly to secure deals. They have done similar work in Europe, and I expect it would happen quickly in Canada as well.” And Carleton professor Dwayne Winseck said “I am not worried. The threats they are making, they are doing this all around the world.”

Despite the assurances, the company was true to its word and blocking news links is now here. If this is a negotiation tactic, it’s a pretty strange one given that reports indicate the company is not talking to the government about potential changes to a law that has already received royal assent. Indeed, while the new Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge urged the company to participate in the regulatory process, there is nothing in the regulations that could alter the fundamental principle in the bill of mandated payments for links. At best, the government could toss aside its commitment to stay out of negotiations by using the regulations to dictate to the supposedly independent CRTC how much needs to be spent in order to avoid Bill C-18’s final offer arbitration provisions. Government negotiating total payment value and eviscerating the CRTC’s independence does not inspire confidence and Meta reasonably wants no part of it, since the time to fix Bill C-18 was before it received royal assent, not after.

Bolded section mine: I didn’t realize that it wasn’t just Canadian media links that were being blocked … it’s all news sites in the world being hidden from Canadian users. That’s an escalation from what I’d originally understood. I don’t blame the “tech giants” at all, but it will be tough on older Canadians who’ve been depending on social media to keep them up-to-date on domestic and foreign news.

August 1, 2023

Evil climate heretics deny the revealed holy truth of global BOILING!

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Notorious heretic Brendan O’Neill preaches climate denial! Where are the Green Gestapo when you need them?

And just like that we’ve entered a new epoch. “The era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived”, decreed UN chief António Guterres last week. It’s hard to know what’s worse: the hubris and arrogance of this globalist official who imagines he has the right to declare the start of an entire new age, or the servile compliance of the media elites who lapped up his deranged edict about the coming heat death of Earth. “Era of global boiling has arrived and it is terrifying”, said the front page of the Guardian, as if Guterres’s word was gospel, his every utterance a divine truth. We urgently need to throw the waters of reason on this delirious talk of a “boiling” planet.

Guterres issued his neo-papal bull about the boiling of our world in response to the heatwaves that have hit some countries over the past two weeks. “Climate change is here [and] it is terrifying”, he said. We see “families running from the flames [and] workers collapsing in scorching heat” and “it is just the beginning”, he said, doing his best impersonation of a 1st-century millenarian crackpot. In fact, forget “climate change”, he said. Forget “global warming”, too. What we’re witnessing is a boiling. It all brings to mind the Book of Job which warned that the serpent Leviathan would cause the seas to “boil like a cauldron”. Leviathan’s back, only we call him climate change now.

The obsequious speed with which the media turned Guterres’s commandment into frontpage news was extraordinary. They behaved less like reporters than like the slavish scribes of this secular god and his delusional visions. “World entering ‘era of global boiling'”, cried the Independent, and we “know who is responsible”. No prizes for guessing who that is. It’s you, me and the rest of our pesky species. It always is. “Planet is boiling”, one headline breezily declared, confirming that Guterres’s fearful phrase, his propagandistic line no doubt drawn up with the aid of spin doctors in some UN backroom, is already being christened as fact.

Almost instantly, media outlets started lecturing readers on how they might help to put a halt to the coming evaporation of our planet. SBS in Australia advised us to “Reduce meat intake”, “Stop driving cars” and “Cut down on flights”. In short, stop all the fun stuff; make sacrifices to appease nature’s angry gods. Even self-styled radicals made themselves mouthpieces of the UN’s medieval sermonising. Novara Media instantly embraced “global boiling” as an apt metaphor for the arsonist impact humanity has had on Earth. Scratch a Marxist these days, find a Malthusian.

“Tonight in the news: the moon is made of green chees- wait, patch downloading … not made of green cheese, and anyone who says it is is a MAGA conspiracist h8er.”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sarah Hoyt on the amazing co-ordination of messaging from so many legacy media and their social media collaborators:

Many of us are amused with how fast the left acquires a sudden mission to propagate the one holy acceptable opinion. How it changes overnight, and how it comes from all of them at once, in almost the same words. And how it gets repeated ad-nauseam, in defiance of all sense, until the message changes.
This has led the least kind among us (eh. Myself, sometimes) to refer to our leftist brethren as “NPC”s who do whatever the programmers put in their heads.

The sad truth, though, is they’re not NPCs. They’re humans, like the rest of us, just — a lot of them — through cowardice or a more conformist temperament, humans who want to be “right” with the “majority” as they perceive it. They, like most primitives the world over, have no moral center, and want to back the winner and the strong horse.

Add in a dose of truly bad education, and their self-conceit as smart, and what you have is someone who reads all the accepted publications, catches on to what they’re saying, and runs to get ahead of what they think will be (and to be fair is, of their kind only) a parade.

The sequence goes something like this: Leftists, for nefarious, stupid, or money reasons (and often all three) declare that they want something utterly, inconceivably stupid to happen: ban something, force some tech, whatever.

Immediately, on command, some “scientist” (usually of the softer side) who smells grant money does studies showing this idea is brilliant and will bring about utopia. The stupid is flawed and irreproducible, but the journalists are all leftists who want to “support the current thing” and jump on it. Suddenly every possible and some imaginary publications tell us how the Current Thing is the most important thing ever, and it must be done nowwwww.

Take Joe Biden’s idea of cooling the Earth by covering the sunlight. — Okay, not his idea. Or maybe it is. Who knows how much meth they’re putting in his ice-cream? — But the idea of the group of people who form “Joe Biden.” Or the idea of those jokers at the WEF that the planet is BOILING and the only solution if for us peasants to surrender to their wisdom and eat the bugs, and give up private transportation.

Dire Straits – Tunnel Of Love (Rockpop In Concert, 19th Dec 1980)

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Dire Straits
Published 28 Apr 2023

Dire Straits performing ‘Tunnel Of Love’ at Rockpop in Concert on December 19th 1980.
Footage licensed from ZDF Enterprises. All rights reserved.
(more…)

July 30, 2023

Letting a UN agency police “disinformation” online? What a great idea! With the best of intentions! What could possibly go wrong?

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Savroula Pabst outlines the United Nations Development Program’s new online anti-disinformation tool, iVerify:

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has quietly announced the rollout of an automated anti-disinformation tool, iVerify, this spring. The instrument, initially created to support election integrity, centers a multi-stakeholder approach spanning the public and private sectors to “provide national actors with a support package to enhance identification, monitoring and response capacity to threats to information integrity”.

The UNDP demonstrates how iVerify works in a short video, where anyone can send articles to iVerify’s team of local “highly-trained” fact-checkers to determine if “an article is true or not”. The tool also uses machine learning to prevent duplicate article checks, and monitors social media for “toxic” content which can then be sent to “verification” teams of fact-checkers to evaluate, making it a tool with both automated- and human-facilitated elements.

On its website, the UNDP makes a blunt case for iVerify as an instrument against “information pollution“, which they describe as an “overabundance” of harmful, useless or otherwise misleading information that blunts “citizens’ capacity to make informed decisions”. Identifying information pollution as an issue of urgency, the UNDP claims that “misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech threaten peace and security, disproportionately affecting those who are already vulnerable”.

But, behind this rhetoric of fact-checking expertise and protecting society’s most marginalized, iVerify, as a tool functionally claiming an ability to separate the true from the false, actually provides governments, adjacent institutions, and the global elite an opportunity for unprecedented dismissal, and perhaps thus subsequent censorship, of dissenting perspectives and inconvenient information and reporting, all behind the pedigree of a UN institution with international reach.

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