Tag Archives: politics

Trust Us

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It seems that Alphabet and Mastercard have hooked up: Mastercard seems to have agreed to share its customers’ shopping habits with Alphabet’s Google in return for Google’s separately accumulated data on those same customers.  The subhead on Bloomberg‘s piece is instructive:

Google found the perfect way to link online ads to store purchases: credit card data

The hookup is this:

For the past year, select Google advertisers have had access to a potent new tool to track whether the ads they ran online led to a sale at a physical store in the US. That insight came thanks in part to a stockpile of Mastercard transactions that Google paid for.

And that Mastercard freely sold.

Who knew the deal had been done?  Almost nobody, especially including the owners (morally if not legally) of those data.

[M]ost of the two billion Mastercard holders aren’t aware of this behind-the-scenes tracking. That’s because the companies never told the public about the arrangement.

Then this:

[T]he deal, which has not been previously reported, could raise broader privacy concerns about how much consumer data technology companies like Google quietly absorb.

Gee.  Ya think?

It also raises the broader privacy concern of how much personal that data primary collectors, like credit card companies, are busily peddling to the Googles of the world behind our backs.

A carefully anonymous Google spokeswoman offered this:

Before we launched this beta product last year, we built a new, double-blind encryption technology that prevents both Google and our partners from viewing our respective users’ personally identifiable information.  We do not have access to any personal information from our partners’ credit and debit cards, nor do we share any personal information with our partners.

Trust us.  Trust us both.

Sure.

Governance by the Left

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It’s only light bulbs, so who cares?  The Know Betters of the EU care, and the subhead on the Deutsche Welle article at the link says it all.

The sale of halogen lightbulbs is being banned across the EU, as LEDs are touted as greener alternatives. Advocates insist the move will save consumers money in the long run and lead to lower carbon emissions.

If that were true, then LEDs would have no trouble competing in a free market and supplanting halogens quite rapidly and freely.

However.

Ordinary citizens are just too grindingly stupid to be trusted to make the correct decisions.  Irmela Colaco, Energy Efficiency Project Leader for the German environmental group BUND:

It’s high time that the planet and consumers were protected from these power guzzlers[.]

Because consumers are just slack-jawed idiots who cannot protect themselves—or who cannot be trusted to protect themselves in the right way.

This is the Europe our own Leftists want us to emulate.

Facts-s-s-s

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It burns-s-s-s….

Brown University has come under fire after censoring its own study on transgender youth, which found that social media and friends can influence teenagers to change their gender identity.

After all, the study’s findings might invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community.  Can’t have the narrative contradicted.

Here are examples of what its study found, according to the study’s author, Lisa Littman, Assistant Professor of the Practice of Behavioral and Social Sciences at Brown, physician, and author of the study:

The transition often happens after teens use social media and watch online videos about transitioning to another gender.
“In on-line forums, parents have been reporting that their children are experiencing what is described here as ‘rapid-onset gender dysphoria,’ appearing for the first time during puberty or even after its completion[.]
“The onset of gender dysphoria seemed to occur in the context of belonging to a peer group where one, multiple, or even all of the friends have become gender dysphoric and transgender-identified during the same timeframe[.]”

And

The parents [surveyed in the study] described “a process of immersion in social media,” such as binge-watching “transition videos” and excessive use of social media, immediately preceding their child becoming gender dysphoric[.]

And a part of the study’s conclusion:

The research goes on to suggest that teens could be influencing each other to promote certain behaviors through “peer contagion.”

Bess Marcus, School of Public Health Dean at Brown, rationalized the university’s censorship this way:

[The university] has heard from Brown community members expressing concerns that the conclusions of the study could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community.
The University and School have always affirmed the importance of academic freedom and the value of rigorous debate informed by research…[all studies] should be debated vigorously.
… At the same time, we believe firmly that it is also incumbent on public health researchers to listen to multiple perspectives and to recognize and articulate the limitations of their work.

But only so long as those multiple perspectives suit the predetermined conclusion.  That’s the critical limitation of any work.

There’s no doubt that gender dysphoria exists.  Understanding it, though, and preventing it or treating it where appropriate are impossible so long as today’s Galileos are to be kept locked away.

On Keeping the Senate Informed

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…to the level Senators deem appropriate.  In a Wall Street Journal article about the fate of the newly negotiated trade agreement between the US and Mexico, there was this plaint from one Senator among others:

Lawmakers from both parties have complained that the Trump administration has broken with precedent by not regularly briefing with Capitol Hill and leaving them largely in the dark about crucial details of the negotiations. “Who knows what’s happening,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R, TN), the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, with a shrug.

That’s all to the good. You guys leak like a sieve, not out of carelessness, but deliberately for personal political gain. And those leaks also often blow up negotiations in progress. But your leaks are more important.

Now the thing will be submitted to you, and you’ll have all the time you need to study it and vote it up or down.

Get over yourselves.

Colloquialisms and Racism

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Ron DeSantis, Republican candidate for Governor of Florida, suggested in an interview shortly after his nomination, that his just-nominated Progressive-Democrat opponent, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, would, if elected, monkey up the Florida economy.

Oh, the hue and cry from the Progressive-Democrats, the NLMSM, and from Gillum.  A colloquialism that plainly means to mess with things, or to mess things up, suddenly is a racist bull horn—much more than a dog whistle according to Gillum.

How can this be?  One candidate says another candidate will mess things up, and this is racist!?

Oh, wait—Gillum is black.

Notice that.  Gillum isn’t a political candidate who happens to be a black man; he’s a black man who happens to be a political candidate.

Americans for generations have worked hard to make race irrelevant.  All men are created equal, equal employment, Martin Luther King’s dream, and on and on.

But not anymore.  The Progressive-Democrat, his Party, and the Left in general insist that what’s important here is the man’s race, not his policies.  It’s his race that gives meaning to the colloquialism, not his policies.

This emphasis by the Progressive-Democrat, his Party, and the Left in general on race is rank racist bigotry.  That it’s wholly artificial, done by politicians solely for personal political gain and by pseudo-journalists solely for click bait makes their racism even worse.

Gillum’s cynically artificial racism should disqualify him from public office.