Category Archives: culture

“Support the Troops”

Posted on by
Reply

Maj ML Cavanaugh, Nonresident Fellow at West Point’s Modern War Institute, had an op-ed in Monday’s Wall Street Journal demurring from Alphabet’s Google’s (a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet) employee’s objection to Alphabet’s working with DoD on a major artificial intelligence project: such work would “irreparably damage Google’s brand” they argue because military.  Cavanaugh suggested that, on the contrary, such mutual work was to the net good, falling behind our enemies on AI could well be fatal to us, DoD should work to expand Defense/tech company interaction, and so on.

Then he closed his piece with this hopeful claim.

Silicon Valley and the US military share compelling interests, and in the end they’re on the same side.

Are they on the same side? With Alphabet’s and Facebook’s repeated anti-democratic copying of personal information, coupled with their deliberately convoluted and incomplete instructions on how individuals can manage parts of their personal information, and now Alphabet’s apparent disdain for the US being able to defend itself, I’m not at all sure that’s accurate.  Especially with Alphabet having already signed a contract with the People’s Republic of China to work on…artificial intelligence.

Equal Protection Under Law

Posted on by
Reply

Harmeet Dhillon, a trial lawyer and California Republican National Committeewoman, has a tweet up regarding equal protection, San Jose, CA, style:

From the 9th Circuit argument Monday morning in Hernandez v. San Jose—City attorney says SJPD should not be held responsible for forcing Trump supporters to walk through a violent mob, because attending a Trump rally is an inherently dangerous act! Did they ask for it?

Play the video, and listen especially to the exchange between the San Jose lawyer and the judge (you may have to crank up the volume to hear the judge).  San Jose is utterly disingenuous in this case.  Equal protection applies, in SJ, only to SJ-approved groups of people.

A Lesson About Discrimination

Posted on by
Reply

A few days ago, The Wall Street Journal ran a piece about a teacher and a principal who taught a 1968 lesson about racial tolerance, using the equally arbritrary blue eyes-brown eyes discriminant as the teaching prop.

A Letter to the Editor response decried both the lesson and the pride in it that was conveyed in that article.

…one of the most disturbing and emotional things I had ever experienced. Teachers whom I once looked up to were subjecting me to irrational and arbitrary treatment based on my eye color. … My father … called my school’s leadership and received a complete apology.

How sad, that letter writer and his father missed the point of the lesson and missed precisely that “disturbing and emotional thing” that real victims of irrational and arbitrary treatment experience.

On the other hand, a commenter in the Letters thread asked this:

Does this same reasoning that this was child abuse apply to the teachers lecturing about “white privilege” and setting up situations to guilt trip children based on their skin color?

How sad, too, that that discrimination is actively practiced today.

Independent Monitor

Posted on by
Reply

Recall Special Counselor Robert Mueller’s raid on President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen’s offices and seizure of Cohen’s records, especially targeting communications between Cohen, the lawyer, and Trump, the client.

Cohen went in to Federal court Friday to try to get the subpoena under which the raid was conducted revoked and the confiscated materials returned.  Some discussion surrounding the events centers on the alleged ability of special monitors—a “taint team”—doing the sorting so as to isolate the privileged communications from the rest of the material sought under the warrant.  Furthermore, this team would, supposedly, conduct its sort before Mueller’s team has gone into the material they seized.

I’ll elide the blatant conflict of interest here centered on the taint team’s members being, at bottom, colleagues of the those who ran the raid and of Mueller: they’re FBI agents and DoJ lawyers.

I’m interested in a larger question that’s not being addressed.  Say Cohen wins his case and the subpoena is quashed and the seized materials returned to him in toto.  On what basis do we conclude that Mueller’s team hasn’t already copied all of those seized materials and separated the copies from the originals?  That by itself, incidentally, would be a good practice with legitimately confiscated materials; reviewing the copies would ensure against accidentally damaging the originals and thereby destroying their legal provenance (as well as their utility for their rightful owners).  On what basis do we conclude that, on Cohen’s victory, those copies would be returned, also?  On what basis do we conclude that Mueller’s team isn’t already reading and evaluating those copies of the seized materials?

We Don’t Get Silicon Valley

Posted on by
Reply

That’s what Facebook MFWCI Mark Zuckerberg said in Tuesday’s hearing in front of the Senate.  On the other hand,

Senator Gary Peters (D, MI) asked whether Facebook is using the microphones of users’ phones to listen in to what they are doing and saying—a charge the company has denied repeatedly in recent months.

And given the level of integrity Facebook managers have shown over the years, of course we should believe their denials. Right.  Never mind that that’s an easily done exploit that hackers have done on and off (pardon the pun) for years.  Right along with playing untoward games with the video cameras on our laptops.

Here’s the kicker, though, from that Senate hearing:

Mark Zuckerberg, Silicon Valley had one for Congress: Why don’t you get us?

The Senators’ questions often were ignorant, but that’s all they were: borne of an ignorance that’s easily corrected. Zuckerberg’s question, to the extent it’s accurately paraphrased and attributed, is a deeply cynical one that carefully misdirects the emphasis, borne as the question is from Silicon Valley’s deeply Leftist ideology—a slant Zuckerberg freely acknowledged a couple of times.

The more accurate question, the more serious question, is why doesn’t Silicon Valley get Americans?