Monthly Archives: January 2021

Alphabet Strikes Again

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Alphabet, through its wholly-owned Google’s wholly-owned YouTube, has censored The Epoch Times, barring the news outlet from its YouTube channel and expelling it from YouTube’s Partner Program, through which The Epoch Times monetized much of its output.

Alphabet claims the news outlet violated its subsidiary’s subsidiary’s “Community Guidelines.” Its YouTube spokesman said,

All channels on YouTube need to comply with our Community Guidelines, and in order to monetize, channels must comply with the YouTube Partner Program policies, which include our Advertiser-Friendly Guidelines. Channels that repeatedly violate these policies are suspended from our partner program.

The spokesman declined to say how the guidelines had been violated, or what output from The Epoch Times had been deemed wanting.

Of course, if Alphabet got specific, it would have to explain its censorship.

Stimulus Checks

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Brittany De Lea wrote in FOXBusiness that $1,400 in checks for the next round of “stimulus” spending might not actually be necessary for all of us.

I agree with the point of the article—not all of us truly need the $1,400. However, the unspent money wouldn’t be wasted or lost to the private economy. The money must still go somewhere: ultimately, it will end up in a bank as savings or in a bank as debt payments.

Money put in a bank, for any reason, becomes loanable funds for the bank, and so makes its way back into the private economy. The only thing here is the time lag: the money won’t be a prompt economic boost.

That boost wouldn’t be necessary anyway, if government—at all levels—got out of the way and let businesses reopen and let us citizens go back to work and go back to spending/saving/paying down debt with our paychecks.

Censorship

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Jack Dorsey is expanding his censorship function, this time under the guise of something he’s euphemistically calling “Birdwatch.”

The project, which is called Birdwatch, will be available to users on a first-come, first-served basis. It will allow users to write notes that provide context to tweets they believe require additional information to be digested by the public responsibly.

First come, first served—so no pretense of an actual cross-section of the speaking or political spectrums. And birders’ definition of “public responsibility,” not posters’ or readers’ definition(s). Can’t have that.

Then there’s Keith Coleman, Twitter Vice President Product:

Birdwatch allows people to identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading or false, and write notes that provide informative context. We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable[.]

Never mind that, for the foreseeable future, “Birdwatch” will exist separately from the Twitter timeline so that Twitter users won’t be able to see this…contextualizing…commentary.

Here’s the kicker, though:

“Birdwatch” users will be allowed to rate the notes of other Birdwatch users, an attempt to prevent bad-faith individuals from undermining the goal of the system.

Gotta keep those censors contextualizers contextualizing from the right slant, after all.

Good Union Jobs

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But not good enough for President Joe Biden (D).  Recall that Biden ran on “good union jobs,” among other causes, and that phrase—”good union jobs”—became so ubiquitous in his speeches as to resemble a tic.

But not all union jobs—labor is another area where Progressive-Democrats choose winners and losers. When Biden killed the Keystone XL pipeline, he killed roughly 11,000 good union construction, construction-related, and ancillary jobs. No matter: Progressive-Democrats, led by Biden, don’t approve of those jobs.

And that doesn’t begin to address the job losses in Canada, jobs that depended on both the pipeline construction and on the subsequent flow of oil.

Discovery

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…can be fun. I’ve often said that in a variety of other venues. Here’s an example of the fun that can be afforded by discovery. Of course, what I’m talking about is the legal process that kicks off most any legal proceeding, a stage during which all parties to a litigation are required to show to all the other parties, voluntarily or under subpoena, everything they have that bears on the matter being litigated.

Dominion Voting Systems has filed, in the DC District, a $1.3 billion lawsuit against lawyer Rudy Giuliani over the latter’s claims regarding Dominion’s varied failures to perform during the just concluded national elections. (Aside: the amount being demanded by Dominion should be a clue to the degree of irrationality of the company’s case.)

The existence of Dominion’s suit now allows Giuliani and his team to investigate the company’s history, finances and practices fully. Here’s Giuliani re the suit:

We get to see the machines that are crooked, the ballots that are fraudulent, and if we’re wrong, we will be made fools of. But if we’re right, a lot of them will go to jail. So, let’s have a trial by combat.

Critically related to that is the fact that Giuliani and his team will have access to all of Dominion’s machines and software that were used in the elections, and those machines and that software must be intact, including all election-related matters as they existed on those machines during the elections and during the ballot-counting on Election Day and the ensuing days.  [T]he actual machines used on 11/3 AND they have to be unwiped — still containing the results from that day, as radio talk show host Joe Pagliarulo put it.