War on the Rocks has an interesting piece on Turkey’s desire to become a natural gas transshipment hub feeding Europe and perhaps Russia. I think, though, that WOTR underplays the purpose of Turkey’s transshipment goal.
Recall the existing conflict between Turkey and Europe over immigration, economics, rule of law EU-style rather than as Recep Erdoğan does it, and a host of other excuses for Turkey to claim to be put upon.
Recall that Alphabet Inc, through its Google arm, has refused to help the US defend itself by refusing to work with DoD on the application of artificial intelligence to military projects. After the resignations described at the link, Alphabet pulled its Google arm out of the project altogether, with effect in 2019 when its current contract expires.
On the other hand, Alphabet is enthusiastic about its Google working within the People’s Republic of China. Mobvoi Inc, headquartered outside Beijing, makes smart watches and smart speakers for sale within—and outside—the surveillance state.
Its engineers build apps using TensorFlow, Google’s free set of development tools for artificial intelligence.
There is a Defcon computer security conference in progress at which a Voting Village hackers collection is busily hacking various voting machine manufacturers’ machines. As McMillan and Volz put it in their Wall Street Journal piece about the Village,
These hacks can root out weaknesses in voting machines so that vendors will be pressured to patch flaws and states will upgrade to more secure systems, organizers say.
Sadly, many of those manufacturers are upset over it, even to the point of warning about voting software license abuse. Even State government representatives don’t like the idea of testing this software’s and these machines’ security. Here’s Leslie Reynolds, National Association of Secretaries of State Executive Director:
I’ve written before about the duplicity of Facebook and its MFWIC Mark Zuckerberg.
Here’s another example, even more blatant than that last.
Recall the bloody mayhem going on in Chicago these days while its mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) fiddles. Over 80 people were killed or injured one recent weekend alone.
Last year, President Donald Trump told Emanuel to get things under control, or else the Feds would. That was a year-and-a-half ago and so greatly predates the recent weekend.
Trump’s own mistake was in not following through on his implied threat.
Christopher Mims had a piece up in his Thursday Tech column concerning the “usefulness” of good-guy bots to help combat filter bubbles, hate speech and harassment, and state-sponsored disinformation, along with other troll-ish speech.
Mims, unfortunately, is operating from the false premise that speech should be censored. Apart from obvious attempts to incite criminal violence, of course it should not be. Free speech must be free, bad speech—whatever that is; the definition varies from person to person and time to time—can only be answered with more speech.
As one commenter on Mims’ piece noted further,
Much is being made about how anthropogenic global warming is causing all those wildfires in California. Cliff Mass had a different view [emphasis in the original].
there is a lot misinformation going around in the media, some environmental advocacy groups, and some politicians. The story can’t be a simply that warming is increasing the numbers of wildfires in California because the number of fires is declining. And area burned has not been increasing either.
And [emphasis added]
[N]ow we get into the real interesting questions that many are not considering. What is driving the ups and downs in wildfires? There are so many factors that must be considered, such as:
Ben Shapiro offered to donate ten stacks to Progressive-Democratic Party candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign for a House seat from a New York district if she would debate him on “all the topics under the sun.” Shapiro also offered to debate her for charity.
Ocasio-Cortez’s response was to call Shapiro a cat-calling man with bad intentions and to refuse to debate him.
It seems the face of the Progressive-Democratic Party hasn’t the courage of the Party’s convictions.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) and House of Representatives candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) are the ideological face of the Progressive-Democratic Party, pushing for socialism to be inflicted on our nation. We can have the political debate, except for the rest of the face of the Party.
Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D, CA) is openly pushing for violence against Republicans and Conservatives. And we have Antifa verbally assaulting Conservatives Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk. While they were not, this time, violent, the Antifa thugs were openly racist in their verbal assault, and they sought to completely shut down political debate concerning the direction our nation should take over the present next election cycle.
Now Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook is being blatant about censoring inconvenient truths. He and Connecticut’s Chris Murphy are peas in a pod.
Elizabeth Heng is a Republican candidate for Congress from a California district centered on Fresno. Her parents are emigres from Cambodia who also had escaped the genocide of the ’70s that Pol Pot had tried to inflict. Heng tried to run a campaign ad that touted that fight, that survival, and her parents’ recovery from that terror. When she put her ad on Facebook, Zuckerberg and his censorship algorithm-programming IT experts said Nope.