GOP Stops Pretending It Ever Actually Cared About ‘Antitrust Reform’

GOP Stops Pretending It Ever Actually Cared About ‘Antitrust Reform’

To be clear, despite the press narrative to the contrary, I don’t think either party is particularly serious about antitrust reform. Congress is simply too grotesquely corrupt, and the combined cross-industry lobbying opposition to meaningful reform too great, to currently be overcome without some sort of major policy and cultural trajectory shift and a massive upheaval in Congress.

Related:

Big Tech Antitrust Push in Congress Is Blunted by GOP-Led House

The appointment of Massie, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained inventor who has filed dozens of patents, signals that the Judiciary Committee under Chair Jim Jordan of Ohio will shift its focus away from legislation aimed at curbing the power of the largest tech companies. Jordan has been more focused on free-speech issues, including big tech’s perceived liberal bias.

“We’re all united in wanting to stop the censorship of conservatives and the suppression of free speech,” Jordan said in an interview. “That’s going to be a focus of the full committee work.”

Funny, that’s not what Massie told Breitbert. 🤷🏼‍♀️

[2019] US military begins testing flying surveillance balloons across the country to TRACK people’s movements

Screenshot from YouTube.

US military begins testing flying surveillance balloons across the country to TRACK people’s movements

The tests were carried out by U.S. Southern Command, or Southcom, which is part of the Department of Defense and is responsible for intelligence operations, security cooperation and disaster response in Central and South America. It’s a joint effort by the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Army and other forces whose main task is finding and intercepting drug shipments that are destined for the U.S. According to the Guardian, as many as 25 unmanned solar powered balloons were launched from rural South Dakota and made their way 250 miles across the neighboring states in tests.

Related:

Worldview Stratollites are commercial high altitude balloons like Google Loon – Worldview had an explosion December 2017

Stratollites can maintain position over specific areas of interest for days, weeks, and eventually months on end. This allows for more sustained measurements and monitoring capabilities over a targeted area. Stratollites can carry a wide variety of commercial payloads (sensors, telescopes, communications arrays, etc.), launch rapidly on demand, and safely return payloads back to earth after mission completion.

Some interesting ‘coincidences’:

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The U.S. Lost the 5G Race…after an Immigrant was Forced to Leave

The U.S. Lost the 5G Race…after an Immigrant was Forced to Leave via Newsthink

Related:

The U.S. Needs a Million Talents Program to Retain Technology Leadership (archived)

It’s not just a matter of enticing new immigrants but of retaining bright minds already in the country. In 2009, a Turkish graduate of the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Erdal Arikan, published a paper that solved a fundamental problem in information theory, allowing for much faster and more accurate data transfers. Unable to get an academic appointment or funding to work on this seemingly esoteric problem in the United States, he returned to his home country. As a foreign citizen, he would have had to find a U.S. employer interested in his project to be able to stay.

Back in Turkey, Arikan turned to China. It turned out that Arikan’s insight was the breakthrough needed to leap from 4G telecommunications networks to much faster 5G mobile internet services. Four years later, China’s national telecommunications champion, Huawei, was using Arikan’s discovery to invent some of the first 5G technologies. Today, Huawei holds over two-thirds of the patents related to Arikan’s solution—10 times more than its nearest competitor. And while Huawei has produced one-third of the 5G infrastructure now operating around the world, the United States does not have a single major company competing in this race. Had the United States been able to retain Arikan—simply by allowing him to stay in the country instead of making his visa contingent on immediately finding a sponsor for his work—this history might well have been different.

Leaked slides detail YouTube’s Ukraine censorship – journalist

Leaked slides detail YouTube’s Ukraine censorship – journalist

According to the slides, the “glorification/promotion of [the] ‘Z’ symbol associated with the Russian military” is labeled “hate” and “extreme” under policy ID 864. So is saying that the conflict “is to denazify the Ukrainian government,” which is what Russian President Vladimir Putin said in February.

Saying that “Ukraine military is attacking its own people” is also considered problematic, ranging from “harmful-misinformation-moderate” (ID 862) to “harmful-misinformation-extreme” (ID 863) if the powers that be decide it amounts to “promotion or glorification.”

Another highlighted phrase under policies 862 and 863 is “US funded bioweapons labs in Ukraine.” Presumably the key word here is “bioweapons,” since the existence of “biological research facilities” in Ukraine was recognized by US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland in a Senate testimony in March, and the Russian military has repeatedly presented evidence that these labs were funded by the US government, and the Pentagon in particular.

One of the slides shows a list of “out of scope” claims, noting there is no “full-scale block on all content” related to the conflict.

Also, don’t speak badly about Azov or you’ll be censored for hate speech. 🙄

H/T: Youtube’s Content Moderation Guidelines Revealed

Google Maps Is Misleading Users Searching For Abortion Clinics…And The GOP Is Threatening The Company If It Fixes That

Google Maps Is Misleading Users Searching For Abortion Clinics… And The GOP Is Threatening The Company If It Fixes That

Related:

Google Maps Regularly Misleads People Searching for Abortion Clinics

“When my partner left the room, I mentioned that I was in an abusive relationship,” said Chey, who asked that her full name be withheld for medical privacy reasons. The staff working at the CPC said that was all the more reason to have the baby. “They told me that carrying a pregnancy could help repair my relationship, that it would cause my partner to step up as a man, and that I would find purpose in life again.”

Domestic Violence And Pregnancy

Pregnant and recently pregnant women are more likely to be victims of homicide than any other cause of death.

A significant proportion of all female homicide victims are killed by their intimate partners.

Domestic violence during pregnancy puts your life and the life of your baby at risk.

Domestic violence is the number one cause of injury to women.

Abusive partners do not stop their violence after the baby is born.

Abusive partners do not become good fathers after the baby is born.

Abuse and Domestic Violence During Pregnancy