The Right Coast

Atop the Powerful Budget Committee at Last, Bernie Sanders Wants to Go Big - The New York Times

Republicans have long feared the prospect of Mr. Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist from Vermont, taking the helm of the powerful committee given his embrace of bigger government and more federal spending with borrowed money. With Democrats reclaiming the Senate, that fear is about to become a reality. Mr. Sanders, the most progressive member of the chamber, will have a central role in shaping and steering the Democrats’ tax and spending plans through a Congress that they control with the slimmest of margins.

via www.nytimes.com

New Bat Species With Orangutan Hue Discovered in West Africa - The New York Times

In 2018, scientists set out on an expedition to survey the habitat of an endangered bat species in the West African country of Guinea. One night, a trap turned up something unusual: a new species of bat with a fiery orange body strikingly juxtaposed with black wings.

via www.nytimes.com

Soooo cute!

AOC: Congress discussing probe to 'rein in' media after Capitol riot

WASHINGTON — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez revealed that Congress is looking into creating an investigative commission to “rein in” the media in the wake of the US Capitol siege.

During a lengthy Instagram Live on Tuesday evening where she revealed that she feared for her life during the siege, the “Squad” member accused the mainstream media of “spewing disinformation” ahead of the deadly riot in which five people died.

“There’s absolutely a commission that’s being discussed but it seems to be more investigating in style rather than truth and reconciliation,” she said.

“I do think that several members of Congress in some of my discussions have brought up media literacy because that is part of what happened here,” Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) went on.

“We’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation,” she said.

“It’s one thing to have differentiating opinions, but it’s another thing entirely to just say things that are false, so that’s something that we’re looking into.”

via nypost.com

Let this sink in awhile.

Trumpunity: How Democrats Are Adopting Trump Rhetoric and Tactics For The Biden Presidency – JONATHAN TURLEY

Napoleon once said “treason is a matter of dates.” And the key date in the United States, for now, appears to be Nov. 7 — the day the media declared Joe Biden the presumptive winner. It also would seem to be the day that millions of Americans became presumptive traitors for questioning the election results. This, according to the same Democrats who once legitimately denounced Trump for calling his critics “traitors” and “enemies of the people.”

It seems Trump is simply too useful to really let go. Without him, the critics would be forced to live according to the values they claimed to defend for the last four years. Why be civil, collaborative or constitutional when you can act like Trump? After all, you’ve got Trumpunity.

via jonathanturley.org

bitcoin: Lost passwords lock millionaires out of their Bitcoin fortunes - The Economic Times

Stefan Thomas, a German-born programmer living in San Francisco, has two guesses left to figure out a password that is worth, as of this week, about $220 million.

The password will let him unlock a small hard drive, known as an IronKey, which contains the private keys to a digital wallet that holds 7,002 bitcoins. While the price of Bitcoin dropped sharply on Monday, it is still up more than 50% from just a month ago when it passed its previous all-time high of around $20,000.

The problem is that Thomas years ago lost the paper where he wrote down the password for his IronKey, which gives users 10 guesses before it seizes up and encrypts its contents forever. He has since tried eight of his most commonly used password formulations — to no avail.

“I would just lay in bed and think about it,” Thomas said. “Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn’t work, and I would be desperate again.”

via economictimes.indiatimes.com

I would try hypnosis.

Amazon Court Filing Includes Chilling Death Threats Published on Parler

Amazon submitted a new filing in federal court on Tuesday in response to an emergency motion by Parler to restore its hosting services through Amazon’s AWS. Parler was kicked offline early Monday after Amazon said the social media company had violated its terms of service and Parler couldn’t find another company willing to do business. Parler sued Amazon on Monday alleging breach of contract and an antitrust violation.

But whatever you think of Amazon’s actions, the filing makes one thing absolutely clear: Parler was a cesspool of racist hate, insurrectionist appeals against the United States, and chillingly specific death threats.

via gizmodo.com

Joint Chiefs of Staff call Capitol riot 'sedition and insurrection'

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon’s senior military leadership on Tuesday branded the riot Jan. 6 at the Capitol “sedition and insurrection” and admonished troops to heed their charge to protect and defend the Constitution “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

The extraordinary memo to all active duty and reserve troops left no doubt that the military’s top brass considered last week’s attack on the  Capitol to be a criminal act and counter to military values and their oaths. Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, signed the memo along with seven other senior leaders.

 “We witnessed actions inside the Capitol building that were inconsistent with the rule of law,” the chiefs wrote. “The rights of freedom of speech and assembly do not give anyone the right to resort to violence, sedition and insurrection. 

via www.usatoday.com

Pentagon to Arm National Guard Troops Deploying to Capitol for Inauguration - The New York Times

WASHINGTON — National Guard troops who are flooding into Washington to secure the Capitol for Inauguration Day will be armed, the Army secretary, Ryan McCarthy, has decided, Defense Department officials said Tuesday.

The armed troops will be responsible for security around the Capitol building complex, the officials said.

As up to 15,000 troops continued to arrive in Washington from all over the country, Defense Department officials had been weighing whether to deploy them with arms. Mr. McCarthy has decided that at the very least those around the Capitol building will carry weapons, said the officials, who confirmed the decision on the condition of anonymity.

via www.nytimes.com

Who Should Make the Online Rules? - The New York Times

The tech companies had the right to block President Trump from their sites this past week, and to stop doing business with an app where some people were urging violence. And I believe they made the right decision to do so.

But it should still make us uncomfortable that the choices of a handful of unelected technology executives have so much influence on public discourse.

via www.nytimes.com

Uh, yeah.

QAnon Woke Up the Real Deep State | by Nicholas Grossman | Jan, 2021 | Arc Digital

But now that QAnon was involved in violent sedition, the national security state is paying attention. Arrests of people caught on camera storming the Capitol have already begun. Prosecutions will follow. Big tech companies — who, while powerful, are weaker than, and have a healthy fear of the government — are now treating QAnon almost like how they treat ISIS. A giant federal apparatus built to fight al Qaeda will shift some capacity to fighting you, especially the white nationalist and anti-government militias in your orbit.

You cheered on lawyers who said they’d release the Kraken. But now you’ve poked Leviathan.

This is what you need to absorb: QAnon and “stop the steal” are forever associated with a violent attack against the United States. Maybe that’s not what it’s meant to you, maybe you think that’s a misread of last week’s events, but that’s how the real Deep State, a lot of elected officials, and much of the public sees it.

If that isn’t what you signed up for, now would be a good time to get out.

via arcdigital.media

Eeyup.

CIA releases UFO black vault documents: See them online

Federal intelligence on extraterrestrial technology — at your fingertips.

By way of the Freedom of Information Act, thousands of the CIA documents on unidentified flying objects (UFOs) — or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), as the government calls them — are now accessible via download at the Black Vault, a website operated by author and podcaster John Greenwald Jr.

The CIA claims they have now provided all the information on UAP they have, though there is no way to know that’s true.

via nypost.com

All this insurrection stuff is just a diversion.

DOJ: 'Hundreds' to be charged after Capitol riots, number of crimes is 'mind-blowing' and includes 'sedition and conspiracy' - TheBlaze

According to the DOJ officials, there are more than 170 active subject files seeking individuals identified as potential persons that committed crimes, a number that is expected to swell into the "hundreds" in coming weeks. The DOJ has launched investigations into serious felony charges of "sedition and conspiracy," as well as a "mind-blowing" number of crimes related to the events that transpired last week.

"That's just the tip of the iceberg," D'Antuono said in his statement.

He revealed that the FBI has collected more than 100,000 pieces of digital media from the public that authorities are using to investigate an extraordinarily broad range of crimes committed by the pro-Trump mob.

"I want to stress that the FBI has a long memory and a broad reach. Agents and our partners are on the streets investigating leads not only here in the D.C. area, but also across the country through the FBI's 56 field offices," D'Antuono added.

"Even if you've left D.C., agents from our local field offices will be knocking on your door if we find out you were a part of the criminal activity at the Capitol," he said.

via www.theblaze.com

How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler - Glenn Greenwald

But today, if you want to download, sign up for, or use Parler, you will be unable to do so. That is because three Silicon Valley monopolies — Amazon, Google and Apple — abruptly united to remove Parler from the internet, exactly at the moment when it became the most-downloaded app in the country.

If one were looking for evidence to demonstrate that these tech behemoths are, in fact, monopolies that engage in anti-competitive behavior in violation of antitrust laws, and will obliterate any attempt to compete with them in the marketplace, it would be difficult to imagine anything more compelling than how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor.

via greenwald.substack.com

Once Trump leaves office, the Senate can’t hold an impeachment trial – HotAir

The reason for this is found in the Constitution itself. Trump would no longer be incumbent in the Office of the President at the time of the delayed Senate proceeding and would no longer be subject to “impeachment conviction” by the Senate, under the Constitution’s Impeachment Clauses. Which is to say that the Senate’s only power under the Constitution is to convict — or not — an incumbent president.

via hotair.com

Michael Luttig.

Ron Paul Posts Criticism of Censorship on Social Media Shortly Before Facebook Blocks Him – JONATHAN TURLEY

The riots are being used as a license to rollback on free speech and retaliate against conservatives.  In the meantime, the silence of academics and many in the media is deafening. Many of those who have spoken for years about the dark period of McCarthyism and blacklisting are either supporting this censorship or remaining silent in the face of it. Now that conservatives are the targets, speech controls and blacklists appear understandable or even commendable.

The move against Paul, a long champion of free speech, shows how raw and comprehensive this crackdown has become. It shows how the threat to free speech has changed. It is like having a state media without state control. These companies are moving in unison but not necessarily with direct collusion. The riot was immediately taken as a green light to move against a huge variety of sites and individuals.  As we have seen in Europe, such censorship becomes an insatiable appetite for greater and greater speech control.  Even Germany’s Angela Merkel (who has a long history of anti-free speech actions) has criticized Twitter’s actions as inimical to free speech.  Yet, most law professors and media figures in the United States remain silent.

via jonathanturley.org

Well, I'm a law professor and I'm not silent. I'm chirping as loudly as I can! Reposts don't necessarily mean endorsements, but I unequivocally endorse what Prof. Turley is saying, and I hope to God that Prof. Rubenfeld is correct that this is all blatantly unconstitutional in his op-ed piece in the WSJ this morning. I make it a point not to criticize fellow law professors, mostly out of healthy sense of self preservation. But you can well imagine what my feelings are about this. Some con law person ought to put together a letter on this and I would gladly sign it. Even better would be some sort of general strike against Amazon, Twitter, Google etc., such as a day without consulting the internet, just to let them know how we feel.

Ron Paul Posts Criticism of Censorship on Social Media Shortly Before Facebook Blocks Him – JONATHAN TURLEY

We have been discussing the chilling crackdown on free speech that has been building for years in the United States. This effort has accelerated in the aftermath of the Capitol riot including the shutdown sites like Parler.  Now former Texas congressman Ron Paul, 85, has been blocked from using his Facebook page for unspecified violations of “community standards.” Paul’s last posting was linked to an article on the “shocking” increase of censorship on social media. Facebook then proceeded to block him under the same undefined “community standards” policy.

via jonathanturley.org

You really can't make this stuff up.

Parler is SUING Amazon! Lawyer Explains Lawsuit - Viva Frei Vlawg - YouTube

Parler filed suit against Amazon. It's a very interesting lawsuit, and I do think it will go somewhere. The only questions will it do too little too late...

via www.youtube.com

The ‘Virtue’ of the New Totalitarians - American Greatness

But there they were—and here we are. It didn’t work out so well for Athenian democracy. Will it be any better for us? No one’s crystal ball is farsighted enough to say. The conflict is between what Samuel Huntington called the American Creed—fired by a belief in the sanctity of individual liberty, private property, and limited government—and the assault on that creed by the forces of “progressive” political correctness and identity politics. 

Later ages are always surprised by the casual brutality of totalitarian regimes. What those innocent ages neglect is the unshakeable (though misguided) conviction of virtue that animates the totalitarians. The historian John Kekes, writing about Robespierre in City Journal some years ago, touched on the essential point. If we understand Robespierre, “we understand that it is utterly useless to appeal to reason and morality in dealing with ideologues. For they are convinced that reason and morality are on their side and that their enemies are irrational and immoral simply because they are enemies.” That is the position of conservatives in American culture today.

via amgreatness.com

Bruce Willis asked to leave pharmacy for not wearing a mask

Bruce Willis was asked to leave a Los Angeles Rite Aid on Monday after he refused to wear a mask, a spy tells Page Six.

The spy says people inside the store became upset that Willis, 65, wasn’t wearing a mask — despite having a bandanna tied around his neck, which he could have easily pulled up.

We’re told the “Die Hard” star, who was photographed at the store without a mask on, walked away without making his purchase.

via pagesix.com

Just another one for the list.

Dems want to bring down anyone who ever backed Trump: Goodwin

Additional proof of Trump’s point comes in the way Big Tech is silencing the president and banishing those who believe Biden’s victory was less than 100 percent clean. Twitter’s claim that it has simply removed about 70,000 bots doesn’t pass the smell test, given the scope of complaints from conservatives about the vast number of followers who suddenly vanished.

Not to be outdone, Facebook blocks any mention of “stop the steal” and Amazon, Apple and Google drove Twitter competitor Parler off the web and out of business.

As Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida put it, “We are now living in a country where four or five companies, unelected, unaccountable, have the monopoly power to decide, we’re gonna wipe people out, we’re going to erase them from any digital platform.”

via nypost.com

'Our souls are dead': how I survived a Chinese 're-education' camp for Uighurs | Uighurs | The Guardian

Suddenly, the officer slammed his fist on the table.

“You know her, don’t you?”

“Yes. She’s my daughter.”

“Your daughter’s a terrorist!”

“No. I don’t know why she was at that demonstration.”

I kept repeating, “I don’t know, I don’t know what she was doing there, she wasn’t doing anything wrong, I swear! My daughter is not a terrorist! Neither is my husband!”

I can’t remember the rest of the interrogation. All I remember is that photo, their aggressive questions, and my futile replies. I don’t know how long it went on for. I remember that when it was over, I said, irritably: “Can I go now? Are we done here?” Then one of them said: “No, Gulbahar Haitiwaji, we’re not done.”

via www.theguardian.com

Don't worry! This sort of thing could *never* happen here. Why not? Because we have a constitution that protects us against this sort of thing. And nobody would ever even imagine doing anything so much against the *Constitution.* Right?

Glenn Greenwald Perfectly Sums Up Dems' Love of Big Tech Censorship by Beth Baumann

Liberals today are about silencing those they disagree with. That's no surprise. We see it on college campuses, and online. Any time a company takes any kind of stance that doesn't align with the left, the company has to "be taken down." It's how we got this cancel culture movement that has dominated our society. And, sadly, this is just the beginning.

via townhall.com

Eeyup.

Nation's Liberals Point Out That Conservatives Could Always Leave Earth, Make Free Society On Some Other Planet | The Babylon Bee

U.S.—After a week in which four corporations demonstrated their ability to crush all dissenting voices and silence the most powerful human on the planet, liberals of the nation remain unsure why conservatives seem so worried.

“We’ve heard this song and dance before,” said local liberal Janet Bobinski.  “They whine and whine about us systematically eliminating their voices and ruining their livelihoods, blah blah blah. This whole time, they have always been free to create their own little conservative media, university, whatever they want - just so long as it’s not on this planet. There’s no room on Earth for free speech and whatnot, but there’s a whole galaxy out there.”

via babylonbee.com

Good point.

The Cultural Purge is Now in Overdrive – Mark E. Jeftovic's Out Of The Cave

Do you want to live in a society where Facebook and Twitter decide not only what is permissible to say but even which narratives can be explored and which ones can’t?

Yes I know, “private companies, their own AUP, blah blah blah” – I’m a libertarian and a tech company CEO, so I know all this. I’ll preempt these objections with what I said in my book, which is that when tech companies base platform/deplatform decisions on something that is happening outside of their platforms, they are in effect, exercising jurisprudence and adjudicating international law. All any company can competently assess is what is happening on within their respective platforms, how their employees are fulfilling their roles and serving the businesses customers and nothing else.

Would you be ok with your employer firing you if enough strangers who don’t know you, don’t do business with your company and have no first hand knowledge of events or what your circumstances are scream at your boss to cut you loose?

Do you want contracts to be subject to negation by  public sentiment of events 2 or 3 or more degrees separated from the contracted parties?

Do you want to have every aspect of your life scrutinized by somebody else’s measure of moral and ideological purity before you can say anything online? How about before you can book a hotel room? Fill up your car with gas? Go shopping? Get on a plane?

After all, we have big data and AI now, so this is all doable. 

Do you really want to live within the constraints of a type of societal social credit system where your every action, your very thoughts are bounded by external and ever shifting, subjective and revisionist social mores? Many of them defined by the most oversensitive, self-absorbed hysterics on social media?

Be very careful if you think this is a good thing, because sooner or later, you’re going to be on the wrong side of it. By then it’ll be too late.

via outofthecave.io

Singapore Police Force can obtain TraceTogether data for criminal investigations: Desmond Tan - CNA

SINGAPORE: The Singapore Police Force (SPF) can obtain TraceTogether data for criminal investigations, said Minister of State for Home Affairs Desmond Tan in Parliament on Monday (Jan 4).

The SPF is empowered under the Criminal Procedure Code (CPC) to obtain any data, and that includes the TraceTogether data, said Mr Tan.

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"The Government is the custodian of the TT (TraceTogether) data submitted by the individuals and stringent measures are put in place to safeguard this personal data," added Mr Tan.

"Examples of these measures include only allowing authorised officers to access the data, using such data only for authorised purposes and storing the data on a secured data platform."

via www.channelnewsasia.com

But don't worry. This could never happen here. We have a constitution that protects us from this sort of thing.

China Develops Helmets for Soldiers With Self-Destruct Button: Report

The Chinese military is equipping soldiers stationed in Tibet with newly developed helmets embedded with a self-destruct button.

The button triggers an embedded bomb to go off, killing the soldier.

“At a battalion or brigade level command center, a commander monitors a soldier who is far away by using the navigation system. The commander can activate the self-destruct function of the soldier’s helmet if he can’t get in contact with him,” state-run media China Observer reported on Dec. 27, 2020.

Soldiers can also press the button themselves. “If a soldier is seriously wounded and doesn’t want to be captured, he can activate the self-destruct function himself. This can maintain his dignity, as well as prevent the enemy from obtaining this system,” the report stated.

via www.theepochtimes.com

I surprised George Lukas didn't think of this.

Uganda Just Nuked Facebook And Twitter For Election Interference, And Twitter Is Having A Meltdown

Twitter, which joined Facebook and Instagram to permanently ban President Donald Trump from its platform last week, condemned the censorship on Tuesday.

“We strongly condemn internet shutdowns,” the Silicon Valley tech giant released in a statement, while shutting down thousands of conservative accounts in an online purge.

via thefederalist.com

Byron York's Daily Memo: The crazy impeachment

The plain meaning of these passages is that impeachment, in the case of a president, is designed to remove that president from office. A secondary purpose is to disqualify a removed president from ever holding federal office again. "It's the impeachment that is the authority for the disqualification," Luttig said. And a former president, by definition, cannot be removed from office. And, by the way, the Constitution specifically lays out the way to deal with wrongdoing once the president is out of office: He will be "liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law."
 
So the Constitution clearly says how presidential wrongdoing should be addressed, both when the president is in office and when he is out of office.

But some Democrats are claiming that they can start impeachment now, when President Trump is in office -- and they're going to do it tomorrow -- and finish it with a Senate trial that takes place, or at least finishes, after the president has left office on January 20. Representative James Clyburn, the third-ranking Democrat in the House, even suggested that, after passing impeachment articles, the House might hold on to them until the new President Biden has a chance to enact his 100-day agenda in Congress, and only then send the impeachment to the Senate for trial. At that point, Donald Trump will have been an ex-president for more than three months.

via www.washingtonexaminer.com

Scoop: Biden inaugural returns cash from ex-senator-turned-foreign agent - Axios

President-elect Joe Biden’s inaugural committee will refund a donation from former Sen. Barbara Boxer after the California Democrat registered as a foreign agent for a Chinese surveillance firm accused of abetting the country’s mass internment of Uighur Muslims, officials tell Axios.

via www.axios.com

Lovely.

Why this teenager publicly ID'd her family at D.C's pro-Trump protests | CBC Radio

Helena Duke says she publicly identified her mother, aunt and uncle from a crowd of Trump supporters in Washington, D.C., because it was "the right thing to do."

Duke, an 18-year-old Massachusetts high school student, spotted her relatives in a viral video of an altercation between Trump supporters and a Black woman in D.C. one day before the deadly siege on the U.S. Capitol building.

On Twitter, she posted: "hi mom remember the time you told me I shouldn't go to BLM protests bc they could get violent...this you?" In a followup tweet, she identified her mom, aunt and uncle by name.

"I think a lot of it came from the fact that it was just very hypocritical, and what she was doing in this video was incredibly wrong," Duke told As It Happens host Carol Off. 

via www.cbc.ca

Goodness.

Capitol Police Chief Says Pleas for Backup Were Ignored - The New York Times

The outgoing head of the Capitol Police requested that D.C. National Guard units be placed on standby in case his small force was overwhelmed by violent protesters last Wednesday, but he was rebuffed by House and Senate security officials and a top Pentagon commander, he said in an interview on Sunday.

Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, who resigned under pressure last week, said he made the request two days before Wednesday’s riot after reviewing intelligence that indicated the demonstration would be larger and more violent that previously anticipated — and repeated his request as he watched the rioters attacking his officers.

“If we would have had the National Guard, we could have held them at bay longer, until more officers from our partner agencies could arrive,” Mr. Sund, who served in the top post for under a year, told The Washington Post.

via www.nytimes.com

Salesforce Shuts Down Trump Campaign Emails Claiming They Incite 'Violence'

Salesforce, the company behind the RNC’s email provider, has reportedly taken action to prevent President Donald Trump and Republicans from using “our services in any way that could lead to violence.” The Trump campaign has not been able to send an email since January 6.

via www.breitbart.com

Parler Faces Complex, Costly Route to Getting Back Online - WSJ

Parler, the social network popular among conservatives and other right-leaning users that was plunged into internet limbo this week, faces a technically complex and costly path to getting back online.

via www.wsj.com

Save the Constitution From Big Tech - WSJ

Section 230 is the carrot, and there’s also a stick: Congressional Democrats have repeatedly made explicit threats to social-media giants if they failed to censor speech those lawmakers disfavored. In April 2019, Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond warned Facebook and Google that they had “better” restrict what he and his colleagues saw as harmful content or face regulation: “We’re going to make it swift, we’re going to make it strong, and we’re going to hold them very accountable.” New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler added: “Let’s see what happens by just pressuring them.”

Such threats have worked. In September 2019, the day before another congressional grilling was to begin, Facebook announced important new restrictions on “hate speech.” It’s no accident that big tech took its most aggressive steps against Mr. Trump just as Democrats were poised to take control of the White House and Senate. Prominent Democrats promptly voiced approval of big tech’s actions, which Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal expressly attributed to “a shift in the political winds.”

For more than half a century courts have held that governmental threats can turn private conduct into state action. In Bantam Books v. Sullivan (1963), the Supreme Court found a First Amendment violation when a private bookseller stopped selling works state officials deemed “objectionable” after they sent him a veiled threat of prosecution. In Carlin Communications v. Mountain States Telephone & Telegraph Co. (1987), the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found state action when an official induced a telephone company to stop carrying offensive content, again by threat of prosecution.

via www.wsj.com

This seems to me very promising. Good luck to Vivek Ramaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld.

Organizations Linked to Chinese Military Are a Cash Cow for American Colleges

Chinese military-linked entities, including those behind extensive cyber attacks and espionage, funneled at least $88 million into U.S. universities over the course of six years, according to a Washington Free Beacon review of federal records.

Some of America's most prestigious universities have cashed lucrative checks from Chinese institutions that directly threatened national security. Duke University operates a joint-campus in China with Wuhan University, a public university that repeatedly carried out cyber attacks on behalf of the Chinese military. Northwestern University and the University of California Irvine have together received more than $4 million in research funding from an entity controlled by the Aviation Industry Corporation of China, a Chinese defense contractor that used stolen designs of American F-35 fighters to build planes for the Chinese military.

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Institutions controlled by the Chinese government—state-owned enterprises, state-controlled public universities, government-controlled nonprofits, and other sources—collectively donated at least $315 million to American colleges between 2014 and 2019. More than a quarter of the contributions—27 percent—came from either state-owned defense contractors or public universities that closely partner with the Chinese military to conduct defense research.

via freebeacon.com

Longevity Linked to Proteins That Calm Overexcited Neurons

So far, research has suggested that severely limiting calorie intake can have a beneficial effect, as can manipulating certain genes in laboratory animals. But recently in Nature, Bruce Yankner, a professor of genetics and neurology at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues reported on a previously overlooked controller of life span: the activity level of neurons in the brain. In a series of experiments on roundworms, mice and human brain tissue, they found that a protein called REST, which controls the expression of many genes related to neural firing, also controls life span. They also showed that boosting the levels of the equivalent of REST in worms lengthens their lives by making their neurons fire more quietly and with more control. How exactly overexcitation of neurons might shorten life span remains to be seen, but the effect is real and its discovery suggests new avenues for understanding the aging process.

via getpocket.com

So I take this to mean if I want to live longer I should just relax. Something we should all learn I guess.

The Great Social Silencing | RealClearPolitics

Last week Silicon Valley silenced the president. In unison, the social media giants, with an assist from Amazon and Apple, also eliminated their most popular conservative competitor and announced that their own moderation policies would now extend to other companies. Meanwhile, CNN openly called for Fox News to be banned from cable, while a major talk radio network issued new speech rules to its hosts, extending tech’s moderation policies to the offline world. Beyond all this, Congress and the European Union called for powerful new regulation of online speech.

As a handful of unelected billionaires declare sovereignty over digital speech, where might the coming months take us?

via www.realclearpolitics.com

indeed

Husband on leash breached Quebec's Covid curfew - BBC News

The woman reportedly told police that she was just out "walking her dog" near their home in the city of Sherbrooke, in Quebec province.

On Saturday the province imposed a nightly curfew between 20:00 and 05:00.

Walking a dog close to home is one of the only acceptable reasons to be outside between those times.

The pair were spotted by police at around 21:00 on Saturday, just a short while after the new rules came into effect.

They reportedly told police that they were following the rule for pets. Isabelle Gendron, of the Sherbrooke Police Department, told the local newspaper La Tribune the couple "did not co-operate with the police at all".

They were each fined CA$1,546 ($1,212; £893).

via www.bbc.com

This Custom, Modernised E-Type Is Worth Every Penny - Carfection - YouTube

The Series 3 has often been regarded as the least desirable E-Type, but the chaps at E-Type UK have turned this one into a modern masterpiece.

via www.youtube.com

Social-Media Oligopolists Are the New Railroad Barons. It's Time for Washington to Treat Them Accordingly - Quillette

It isn’t just the technology itself that has drastically altered the debate about the limits of inflammatory speech, but also the consequent shift in decision-making power from public to private hands. Just a few decades ago, it was taken for granted that government policymakers and Supreme Court justices were the most important decision makers when it came to setting the ground rules on free speech. That’s no longer the case, because the entities that control mass-market peer-to-peer content, software, and monetization—including Google, Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, PayPal, GoFundMe, and Patreon—are largely unconstrained by any kind of government oversight. These are privately run companies that have aggressively leveraged network effects—the phenomenon by which the value of a user’s network engagement increases in tandem with the participation of other users—to create a communications oligopoly. As a result, crucial decisions about what can and cannot be said in the public sphere are now being made by small groups of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. In some cases, it really just comes down the up-or-down vote of a single person.

via quillette.com

And in this case, it's the up-or-down vote of dude with a long, smelly beard windsurfing in Tahiti.

We Need a New Media System - TK News by Matt Taibbi

The moment a group of people stormed the Capitol building last Wednesday, news companies began the process of sorting and commoditizing information that long ago became standard in American media.

Media firms work backward. They first ask, “How does our target demographic want to understand what’s just unfolded?” Then they pick both the words and the facts they want to emphasize.

It’s why Fox News uses the term, “Pro-Trump protesters,” while New York and The Atlantic use “Insurrectionists.” It’s why conservative media today is stressing how Apple, Google, and Amazon shut down the “Free Speech” platform Parler over the weekend, while mainstream outlets are emphasizing a new round of potentially armed protests reportedly planned for January 19th or 20th.

What happened last Wednesday was the apotheosis of the Hate Inc. era, when this audience-first model became the primary means of communicating facts to the population. For a hundred reasons dating back to the mid-eighties, from the advent of the Internet to the development of the 24-hour news cycle to the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the Fox-led discovery that news can be sold as character-driven, episodic TV in the manner of soap operas, the concept of a “Just the facts” newscast designed to be consumed by everyone died out.

News companies now clean world events like whalers, using every part of the animal, funneling different facts to different consumers based upon calculations about what will bring back the biggest engagement kick. The Migrant Caravan? Fox slices off comments from a Homeland Security official describing most of the border-crossers as single adults coming for “economic reasons.” The New York Times counters by running a story about how the caravan was deployed as a political issue by a Trump White House staring at poor results in midterm elections.

via taibbi.substack.com

Big Tech’s War on Free Speech - American Greatness

In just the past few days, Twitter banned the account of Trump campaign digital director Gary Coby, accusing him of letting Trump use his account. At the same time, conservatives on Twitter are reporting they’re losing tens of thousands of followers. Brian Kilmeade “lost 30K followers in 4 hours”; Terrence K Williams tweeted, “I lost 100,000 followers”; Omar Navarro “lost 28K followers in one day”; Dave Rubin said, “I’ve lost over 35K followers on this authoritarian shitscape in the last 48 hours”; actress Kristy Swanson “lost another 20,000 followers overnight”; Rachel Campos-Duffy reported, “I lost 8K followers in 24 hours”; Michael Malice tweeted, “just lost 200 followers in the last 5 minutes”; journalist Byron York tweeted, “now down nearly 29,000.”

via amgreatness.com

Germany's Merkel hits out at Twitter over 'problematic' Trump ban

LONDON — German Chancellor Angela Merkel blasted Twitter’s decision to ban U.S. President Donald Trump.

“The right to freedom of opinion is of fundamental importance,” Steffen Seibert, Merkel’s chief spokesman, told reporters in Berlin on Monday, according to Reuters.

“Given that, the chancellor considers it problematic that the president’s accounts have been permanently suspended.”

Seibert said that, while Twitter was right to flag Trump’s inaccurate tweets about the 2020 U.S. election, banning his account altogether was a step too far. He added that governments, not private companies, should decide on any limitations to freedom of speech.

Twitter was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.

via www.cnbc.com

Social Media Purge, Big Tech & Special Announcement | Tulsi Gabbard | DIRECT MESSAGE | Rubin Report - YouTube

Dave Rubin of The Rubin Report talks to Tulsi Gabbard (former Congresswoman) about the Big Tech social media purge, Trump being banned from Twitter, the censorship of Parler by Google, Apple and Amazon and shares an exclusive announcement with Rubin Report viewers. Tulsi Gabbard shares her concerns with the amount of power that tech corporations hold over our ability to communicate with each other. She discusses the ramping up of social media censorship on the major tech platforms and how she is using Locals.com to protect her ability to communicate with her followers.

via www.youtube.com

Parler sues Amazon Web Services after being forced offline

Parler sued Amazon’s cloud-computing business Monday after the tech titan forced the controversial social network to go dark.

The 18-page complaint filed in Seattle federal court claims Amazon Web Services’ decision to stop hosting Parler was a politically motivated scheme to protect Twitter — another Amazon client — from competition.

“AWS’s decision to effectively terminate Parler’s account is apparently motivated by political animus,” the lawsuit reads. “It is also apparently designed to reduce competition in the microblogging services market to the benefit of Twitter.”

The suit came hours after AWS cut off Parler’s access to its servers because of its failure to police the threats of violence that proliferated on the platform ahead of last week’s pro-Trump siege on the US Capitol.

via nypost.com

So they've got federal district court in Seattle, then the 9th Circuit, then the Supremes. I wish them luck.

Byron York's Daily Memo: For GOP, nine perilous days

House Republicans have a conference call scheduled for Monday afternoon, which will give leaders their first opportunity to gauge what a wide variety of GOP lawmakers are thinking about the issue. Right now, it appears the great majority of Republicans believe that, as awful as the events of the last week were, the president did not commit an impeachable offense. Perhaps some others aren't sure but believe that whatever Trump's behavior, it is unrealistic to try to impeach him in the course of a few days when the president is literally on his way out the door. A very small number might support impeachment, while still others believe a quickie impeachment, whether warranted or not, would set a terrible precedent.

via click1.trk-washingtonexaminer.com

Lately we seem to like terrible precedents.

Twitter Is The Enemy Of The American People

On Oct. 18, 2020, Twitter banned the account of Dr. Scott Atlas for defending President Donald Trump’s position on mask mandates. In his tweet, he cited scientific studies, and the tweet contained absolutely no false information.

Also in October, Twitter banned the account of The New York Post for accurately reporting on a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Today we know these were just the first salvos in this evil company’s assault on American liberty.

For all its talk about safety, community, and the health of discourse, we see today that Twitter acts in favor of one interest and one interest alone: its own, even when it means destabilizing the American people. On Friday, the company permanently banned Trump from its platform and began a purge of conservative voices.

They claim this is needed to protect America from a coup. That is a farcical lie. They did it because their political enemies such as Trump and Sen. Josh Hawley are now out of power, and they mean to keep it way.

As a private company, Twitter is free to do as it pleases. And I am free to call them what they are: a shill for communist China that seeks the destruction of America.

Do you doubt that? Then explain why Iran can call for Jews to be killed on Twitter’s platform and China can spread propaganda about how rounding up Uyghur men and forced sterilization of Uyghur women is actually good, but Donald Trump can’t tweet. It is evil. And anyone defending Jack Dorsey’s death machine is complicit.

via thefederalist.com

Who’s Reeling? | Power Line

There is every reason to hope and expect that the Republicans will retake both the Senate and the House in 2022, and in the meantime the damage the Democrats can do, while certainly substantial, is limited by their slim control over both houses of Congress. They can’t make radical changes without doing away with the filibuster, and they can’t do away with the filibuster–which, by the way, would probably be to their long-term disadvantage–without the support of Joe Manchin, who has vowed to vote No, and every other Senate Democrat.

via www.powerlineblog.com

Hope.

Crazy 2020 Is Dead! Long Live Crazier 2021! - American Greatness

A day after Michelle Obama’s call, Trump coincidentally was indeed banned from Twitter “for life,” along with a number of conservatives, and “indefinitely” canceled from Facebook. Trump followers fleeing to alternate social media sites discovered that their apps could be blocked by Apple and Google.

Amazon joined in blocking the servers of one of these, again coincidentally. The Left and a few terrified Republicans planned to impeach Trump even if out of office, sort of like those grotesque stories of those who hang, decapitate, or chop up the corpses of the dead.

The trillion-dollar social media monopolies, on cue from the Obamas and the Left, are now making the necessary adjustments for a hard left-wing controlled presidency and Congress.

Soon, in calmer times, antitrust lawyers will be suing Big Tech for its efforts to destroy its business rivals and ideological opponents as a textbook case of corporate market rigging.

In the 19th century, “progressives” sought to curb the power of monopolies and trusts on the logic that the proverbial people had only the railroads or telegraphs to travel or communicate, and should be freed from their octopus “tentacles.” The railroad argument, “Ride a horse if you don’t like us,” never washed.

Now progressives enlist social media monopolies to ensure that they alone can control, censor, and cancel incorrect communications over the publicly owned airspace. “Just email or use your cell phone, if you don’t like us” won’t wash either. Progressives are no longer the watchdogs breaking up trusts. They are the trusts breaking up watchdogs.

Soon we may see all alternative social media emasculated, those with conservative views deplatformed, and the United States becoming essentially a closed society. How can we resist China when we become China—the model of efficiency in the mind of many progressives, some of whom praise their control of the social media and their solar and wind energy authoritarianism.

via amgreatness.com

VDH.

Biden picks someone with no experience to run the CIA

As Joe Biden continues to flesh out his cabinet and White House staff, I’m seriously beginning to wonder if anyone is actually advising him on these picks. We already discussed his curious choice of Gina Raimondo for Commerce, and now he’s made an even stranger selection. For some reason, Uncle Joe has tapped former Deputy Secretary of State William Burns to take charge at the CIA. The 64-year-old Burns certainly has plenty of experience in the swamp, having served under multiple administrations, but he’s a career diplomat. There is virtually nothing in his record to suggest that he has any experience in the intelligence community, and that’s only the beginning of his shortcomings. (Associated Press)

via hotair.com

China.