Soldiers Understand "Our" Political Elites And Their Masters Aren't Good Stewards Of Society

military  |  Those conducting the sessions wanted "to make sure that military members understand the difference between Seattle and [the Jan. 6 riot in] Washington, D.C.," Colón-López said. "But some of our younger members are confused about this, so that's what we need to go ahead and talk to them about and educate them on, to make sure that they know exactly what they can and cannot do."

Colón-López also noted the military was called to respond after the Capitol attacks, but was not called up to support law enforcement during the Seattle protests.

And he drew a distinction between those who lawfully exercised their First Amendment rights to protest during last summer's protests in support of racial justice and the Black Lives Matter movement, and those who "latched on" to the protests to loot, destroy property and commit other crimes.

But sometimes, he said, younger troops see messages on TV that blur the lines between the two, and "we needed to educate them" on the difference.

"No, that's not what that meant," Colón-López said. "There were people advocating [against] social injustice, racial injustice and everything else, and it is the right of citizens."

When asked about networks or television personalities popular among service members who have drawn those equivalencies, Colón-López said, "Those are very, very tough conversations to have with people, because sometimes they're emotional about the subject."

While those TV personalities are exercising the right to free speech troops have fought for, he said, "make sure that you're well-educated and don't be an automatic mouthpiece for something unless you understand the issue."

Colón-López acknowledged that the "information overload" troops today face -- not just traditional media and memos from service leaders, but also a panoply of social media amplifying different messages -- can leave troops feeling confused and uncertain where to go to get reliable information.

"What I am committed to is to make sure that our people understand right from wrong," he said. "That our people ... are well-educated to be able to carry on, in an honorable fashion. And if they hear somebody saying the wrong things, that they're quick to go ahead and correct them ... without being confrontational."

Colón-López stressed the refrain commonly heard from top military leaders that the vast majority of troops do not share extremist views.

And the military isn't interested in monitoring troops' online activities at home, he said. A service member who Googles QAnon, for example, may just want to become educated on the online conspiracy theory movement, he explained. That wouldn't mean someone necessarily believes in that ideology.

But, he noted, the military needs to be watchful of how service members carry themselves while on duty, and what troops' friends say they are doing.

Vindictive "Morality" Is The Unenforceable Quintessence Of Woke-ism

theapeiron  |  Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, Robert Aaron Long was trying to purge himself of his sex addiction by murdering women at spas and massage parlors. According to police, these spas were “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.” Apparently, it never occurred to Long to see a therapist, or pick up a self-help book. Nope, his first thought was to go out and buy a handgun, and then go on a shooting spree. That’s what our dominant culture still teaches men, to solve their problems by punishing women. Long is just an extreme example of the violence we witness every day.

Maybe you don’t see much in common between a deadbeat dad and a mass shooter. I assure you, they have everything in common. They both practice vindictive morality. It’s a problem, especially for women — or anyone who can be turned into a scapegoat.

I’ll explain.

Genuine morality involves a deep, sincere sense of personal responsibility for your own actions. You follow the core western monotheistic principle of judging yourself before judging everyone else. You hold yourself to a higher standard. You focus on staying consistent with your own beliefs. You practice self-awareness and reflection, and you always try to understand how your actions affect those around you.

Sounds great, right?

In other words, you try to mind your own business. You don’t concern yourself with what other people might be doing, unless it presents an immediate threat to you or someone you care about.

Vindictive morality goes against all of that. You see it a lot in the Westboro Baptist types. They assume they’re inherently right, and morally superior to everyone else. They’re pure.

The only way they could possibly do something wrong is if an outside influence corrupts their immortal soul. Of course, this is always happening in their mind. They’re in an endless war against sin.

Vindictive morality is a way of not taking responsibility for your own actions. It’s a way of attributing any bad thoughts you might have to some external source, thus maintaining the illusion that you’re truly an innocent little kid at heart, incapable of malice. If they wind up hurting someone, then it’s always someone else’s fault.

It’s one of the oldest stories in the book. And that book is the bible.

Not Even The FBI Director Can Play Along With The Atlanta Anti-Asian Racism Trope...,

npr  |  So obviously, it's a heartbreaking incident, and it hits particularly close to home for me since I consider Atlanta home. And so I certainly grieve for the victims and their families. The FBI is supporting state and local law enforcement, specifically APD, the Atlanta Police Department, and the [Cherokee County] Sheriff's Office. So we're actively involved but in a support role.

And while the motive remains still under investigation at the moment, it does not appear that the motive was racially motivated. But I really would defer to the state and local investigation on that for now.

I elevated racially motivated violent extremism to our top threat priority level about a year and a half ago or so. And I've been trying to call out this threat for a number of years now since I've been in this job.

We have doubled the number of domestic violent extremist investigations we've had since where they were when I started as director, and we were up to about 2,000. And that was before the Jan. 6 siege. So I expect the numbers to be even higher this year. And arrests likewise went up dramatically from 2019 to '20.

And so at the same time, the international terrorism threat — especially international terrorist organizations that inspire homegrown violent extremists here in the U.S. — hasn't gone away by any stretch of the imagination. So we clearly are making do right now with what we have. But we need and will need more resources to tackle that problem.

The sprawling investigation into Jan. 6

You know, I was appalled that something like that could happen in this country and determined to make sure that it doesn't happen ever again. ...

We intend to see this to its conclusion, no matter how many people it takes us to devote to it, no matter how long it takes us to do it, we're going to see it to the end. ... If we have the evidence to charge somebody and they committed a crime on that day, I expect them to be charged. ...

We've arrested people all over the country. I think we have ... open investigations specifically related to the Jan. 6 siege in all but one of our 56 field offices, which gives you a sense of the national sprawl of the investigation. And in some of those instances, there have already been conspiracy charges — small, I would call them — sort of small cells of individuals working together, coordinating their travel, etc. I don't think we've seen some national conspiracy, but we're going to keep digging.

 

Rev. Sen. Raphael Warnock's Ex-Wife Paid To Keep Quiet By The American Baptist Home Mission?

dailymail | 'I'm going to stay focused': Georgia Dem Senate candidate Raphael Warnock dodges questions about police bodycam showing ex-wife accuse him of running over her foot with his car

• Rev. Raphael Warnock, 51, declined to address police video of domestic dispute
• Warnock and his ex-wife Ouleye Ndoye, 35, divorced in May
• In March she called police to their Atlanta home after an incident in the drive
• She accused him of deliberately driving over her foot during an argument
• Warnock said he did not believe he ran over her and medics found no injuries 
• No charges were filed following the incident 
• Ndoye told officers that he was 'a very good actor' and obsessed with reputation
• She said she had 'tried to keep the way that he acts under wraps' for the election

ouleye |  Ouleye Ndoye is a global leader in human rights with over a decade of experience in government, non-profits, and academia. She advocates for the health, education, gender equality, and religious freedoms of people around the world and has dedicated her academic pursuits to these issues. Ndoye earned her bachelor's degree in international studies from Spelman College in Atlanta, GA, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude with honors; master of science in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford, UK; and master of arts in History with a concentration on African and Global history from Columbia University in the City of New York. Ndoye currently serves as the National Coordinator for Scholarships and Emerging Leaders at the American Baptist Home Mission Societies. 

- The Baptists Paid this woman to keep quiet about Warnock after the Dailymail Domestic Violence story broke in December - It is an OH TOO SWEET Irony That She is a specialist in Human Trafficking in light of the human trafficking massage parlor murders last week.

pathwaystofreedom |  Spelman College graduate Ouleye Ndoinye Warnock brings a wealth of local knowledge to her new role as Atlanta’s human trafficking senior fellow. With more than a decade of experience working to address human trafficking and other human rights-related issues around the world, Ouleye is well-positioned to lead efforts to tackle labor and sex trafficking in a city with a rich history of civil rights leadership.

 

Getting Close To The Secrets Of Superconductivity

quantamagazine  |  For the last three years, electrons have been toying with physicists.

The game started in 2018 when the lab of Pablo Jarillo-Herrero announced the find of the decade: When the researchers stacked one flat sheet of carbon atoms on top of another, applied a “magic” 1.1-degree twist between them, then cooled the atomic wafers to nearly absolute zero, the sample became a perfect conduit of electrons.

How were the particles conspiring to slip flawlessly through the graphene sheets? The kaleidoscopic “moiré” pattern created by the skew angle seemed significant, but no one knew for sure. To find out, researchers started twisting and stacking every material they could get their hands on.

At first, the electrons played along. Experiment after experiment found that, in an array of flat materials, frigid temperatures brought plummeting electric resistance. A more profound understanding of the conditions necessary for ideal conduction felt close, and with it, a tantalizing step toward an electronics revolution.

“It seemed like superconductivity was everywhere,” said Matthew Yankowitz, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Washington, “no matter what system you looked at.”

But the electrons proved coy. As researchers inspected their samples more carefully, the instances of superconductivity vanished. In some materials, resistance wasn’t actually getting down to zero. In others, different tests offered conflicting results. Only in the original double-layered graphene did electrons regularly achieve a frictionless flow.

“We had this zoo of different twisted materials, and twisted bilayer graphene was the only one that was clearly a superconductor,” Yankowitz said.

Then in the past month, two papers published in the journals Nature and Science described a second related superconductor, a three-layer graphene sandwich with the “bread” sheets aligned and the filling sheet skewed by 1.56 degrees. The unmistakable electron-carrying prowess of twisted trilayer graphene confirms that the two-wafer system was not a fluke. “It was the first of a family of moiré superconductors,” said Jarillo-Herrero, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who also led one of the new experiments, “and this one is the second member of the family.”

Importantly, this second sibling has helped to illuminate an underlying mechanism that could be what powers the superconductivity of these materials.

In the months after the 2018 discovery, one group of theorists began to puzzle over the mechanism that made bilayer graphene superconduct. They suspected that one particular geometric trait might allow electrons to swirl into exotic maelstroms that behave in an entirely novel manner. This mechanism, which is unlike any of the (few) known schemes responsible for superconductivity, would explain the superconductive success of bilayer graphene, as well as the failure of other materials. It also predicted that graphene’s trilayer sibling would superconduct as well.

 

The SMART Healthcards Framework

unlimitedhangout |  The SMART Health Cards framework was developed by a team led by the chief architect of Microsoft Healthcare, Josh Mandel, who was previously the Health IT Ecosystem lead for Verily, formerly Google Life Sciences. Verily is currently heavily involved in COVID-19 testing throughout the United States, particularly in California, and links test recipients’ results to their Google accounts. Their other COVID-19 initiatives have been criticized due to still-unresolved privacy concerns, something that has also plagued several of Verily’s other efforts pre-COVID-19, including those involving Mandel.

Of particular concern is that Verily, and by extension Google, created Project Baseline, which has been collecting “actionable genetic information” with a focus on “population health” from participants since 2017. Yet, during the COVID-19 process, Project Baseline has become an important component of Verily’s COVID-19 testing efforts, raising the unsettling possibility that Verily has been obtaining Americans’ DNA data through its COVID-19 testing activities. While Verily has not addressed this possibility directly, it is worth noting that Google has been heavily involved in amassing genomic data for several years. For instance, in 2013, Google Genomics was founded with the goal of storing and analyzing DNA data on Google Cloud servers. Now known as Cloud Life Sciences, the Google subsidiary has since developed AI algorithms that can “build your genome sequence” and “identify all the mutations that an individual inherits from their parents.”

Google also has close ties with the best-known DNA testing companies in the United States, such as Ancestry.com. Ancestry, recently purchased by private-equity behemoth Blackstone, shares data with a secretive Google subsidiary that uses genomic data to develop lifespan-extending therapies. In addition, the wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, is the cofounder and CEO of DNA testing company 23andMe. Wojcicki is also the sister of the CEO of Google-owned YouTube, Susan Wojcicki.

Google and the majority of VCI’s backers—Microsoft, Salesforce, Cerner, Epic, the Mayo Clinic, and MITRE Corporation, Change Healthcare—are also prominent members of the MITRE-run COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition. Other members of that coalition include the CIA’s In-Q-Tel and the CIA-linked data-mining firm Palantir, as well as a myriad of health-care and health-record companies. The coalition fits well with the ambitions of Google and like-minded companies that have sought to gain access to troves of American health data under the guise of combatting COVID-19.

The COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition describes itself as a public-private partnership that has enabled “the critical infrastructure to enable collaboration and shared analytics” on COVID-19 through the sharing of health-care and COVID-19 data among members. That this coalition and VCI are intimately involved with MITRE Corporation is significant, given that MITRE is a well-known, yet secretive, contractor for the US government, specifically the CIA and other intelligence agencies, which has developed Orwellian surveillance and biometric technologies, including several now focused on COVID-19.

Just three days before the public announcement of VCI’s establishment, Microsoft Healthcare and Google’s Verily announced a partnership along with MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute to share the companies’ cloud data and AI technologies with a “global network of more than 168,000 health and life sciences partners” to accelerate the Terra platform. Terra, originally developed by the Broad Institute and Verily, is an “open data ecosystem” focused on biomedical research, specifically the fields of cancer genomics, population genetics, and viral genomics. The biomedical data Terra amasses includes not only genetic data but also medical-imaging, biometric signals, and electronic health records. Google, through its partnership with the Pentagon, which was announced last September, has moved to utilize the analysis of such data in order to “predictively diagnose” diseases such as cancer and COVID-19. US military contractors, such as Advanced Technology International, have been developing wearables that would apply that AI-driven predictive diagnosis technology to COVID-19 diagnoses.

The Vaccine Credential Initiative

Forbes  |  At a concert you usually come with your ticket, either electronic or physical, and stand ready to have it scanned. Now imagine going to that same show and, while someone is scanning your ticket, they also ask for your vaccine ID. So you pull it up on your phone and let them scan it, too, allowing the venue to verify you’re up to date on your Covid-19 vaccine. It’s only then that you are allowed to see the show.

This isn’t a far-fetched scenario. A group of businesses from the healthcare sector are banding together to create digital vaccine ID cards that verify Covid-19 vaccination status. In the future these cards, which can be stored on smartphones and other digital devices, may be required to gain entry into restaurants, bars, schools and airplanes. It’s a step that might be necessary in order to reopen the economy as quickly as possible. 

“Hopefully, we can quickly bring people who are vaccinated back into the workplace,” says Joan Harvey, president of care solutions at Evernorth. Evernorth is one of the groups working to develop these ID cards, along with Mitre, Cerner, Epic, Mayo Clinic, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, The Commons Project and other major companies. Together they’re forming the Vaccination Credential Initiative, which plans to create an accessible, secure way to prove Covid-19 vaccination status. These SMART health cards will be an encrypted vaccine record that can be stored in any digital wallet. For those that don’t have smartphones, says Brian Anderson, chief digital health physician at Mitre, the vaccine records can “easily be stored on a paper QR code.” 

Though some of the companies that have joined the coalition have never worked together before, representatives say that they’ve been united by a desire to end the pandemic as soon as possible. For example, Cerner and Epic, two of the largest competing electronic medical records companies in the country, have both joined the coalition and are working together to create an ID card that will easily integrate with both of the company’s platforms.  “A pandemic has an incredible catalytic power to bring together nontraditional partners,” Anderson says, “partners that might otherwise be competitors.” And while the coalition is made up of companies from the private sector, they’re also working closely with the government, he adds.

Vaccine ID cards aren’t a new idea. Several countries already require proof of vaccination against diseases like yellow fever before travelers are allowed to enter. Even right now, healthcare workers who have gotten the Covid-19 vaccine have a white piece of paper that lists the date of vaccination. But vaccine ID cards like this “would be on a completely different scale,” says Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious disease physician. It could be the first time that proof of vaccination is required to do things that were previously mundane, like eat at a restaurant or go to work. Of course, Kuppalli says, “I think there are a lot of ethical issues that we have to think about before we go down this path.” 

R. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, agrees that there are several ethical hurdles that could arise. While public and private entities could make proof of vaccination a condition of entry, she says, there will always be exceptions. “Private employers could make vaccination a general requirement for employees in at-will states,” she says, “but there would have to be exceptions for employees who are medically contraindicated, those who are disabled and unable to take the vaccine, and possibly for those with a religious objection.”

Variants Require Restrictions And Vaccinations And More Restrictions Mein Führer!!!

WaPo |  If you live in the northeastern part of our country, you don’t put your winter jackets into storage at the first sign of spring because you know a cold snap is likely lurking around the corner. The same must be true of the pandemic.

No matter where you live, it is too early to relax restrictions that continue to have a critical role in controlling this pandemic. From California to Maine, Florida to Seattle, the covid-19 winter is not yet done, and highly infectious variants are threatening new storms.

Vaccination numbers are climbing steadily, and coronavirus cases have been declining. The end of the pandemic is in sight. But the latest national data, which show case rates have plateaued, indicate that we are not there yet. Over the past week, we have seen about 50,000 new cases reported daily. That’s not far from the height of the surge last summer.

National data also miss disturbing state and local trends: About 15 states have more cases than they did two weeks ago, and about 19 states have higher test positivity rates than two weeks ago, indicating higher rates of infection. Hospitalizations, which typically lag infections by two to three weeks, have begun to inch up in some places. Deaths from covid-19, which typically lag another two weeks behind hospitalizations, may rise again in April — all while states begin to loosen restrictions. That’s a problem.

Blame it on the variants of this virus. The B.1.1.7 variant, the most widespread of the variants identified to date, is between 43 and 90 percent more infectious than the version of the virus we have been living with for most of the past year. And this variant was estimated to make up 30 to 40 percent of U.S. infections earlier this month, meaning about 20,000 new cases each day are likely B.1.1.7 and are way more infectious. Vaccinations are in a footrace against these variants, and the variants are giving us a run for our money.

Consider what’s happening in Florida, where thousands are celebrating spring break without masks or social distancing. Right now, the rate of cases and deaths in Florida are about the same as nationally, and the number of daily infections is holding steady. But the B.1.1.7 variant now represents more than half of Florida’s cases. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is right to warn about a new surge of illness, hospitalization and death as a result.

B.1.1.7 is on a trajectory to become the dominant variant in the United States in the next couple of weeks. To understand why this matters, look to Europe, where the rise of the variant saw large increases in cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Data suggest that B.1.1.7 is so much more infectious that it can shift outbreaks into overdrive, turning small upswings in cases into lethal, prolonged spikes. And there’s some data that it is more deadly, too.

So are we destined for a fourth surge? Not necessarily. The vaccines in use in the United States are effective against B.1.1.7, and we are much further along in our vaccine rollout than Europe, which had barely begun doling out shots when the variants were picking up steam. But we must keep vaccinating, and fast. By the end of April, every high-risk American should have at least one dose in their arms, massively reducing the risk of death from infection. Until that happens, we should keep restrictions in place. We are doing a great job on vaccinations. But on keeping public health measures in place until high-risk people are vaccinated? Not so much.

 

Cornpop Struggles....,

Blue-Anon Infinitely More Dangerous And Destructive Than Q-Anon...,

greenwald |  Journalists with the largest and most influential media outlets disseminated an outright and quite significant lie on Tuesday to hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, on Twitter. While some of them were shamed into acknowledging the falsity of their claim, many refused to, causing it to continue to spread up until this very moment. It is well worth examining how they function because this is how they deceive the public again and again, and it is why public trust in their pronouncements has justifiably plummeted.

The lie they told involved claims of Russian involvement in the procurement of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, The New York Post obtained that laptop and published a series of articles about the Biden family’s business dealings in Ukraine, China and elsewhere. In response, Twitter banned the posting of any links to that reporting and locked The Post out of its Twitter account for close to two weeks, while Facebook, through a long-time Democratic operative, announced that it would algorithmically suppress the reporting.

The excuse used by those social media companies for censoring this reporting was the same invoked by media outlets to justify their refusal to report the contents of these documents: namely, that the materials were “Russian disinformation.” That claim of “Russian disinformation” was concocted by a group of several dozen former CIA officials and other operatives of the intelligence community devoted to defeating Trump. Immediately after The Post published its first story about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine that traded on his influence with his father, these career spies and propagandists, led by Obama CIA Director and serial liar John Brennan, published a letter asserting that the appearance of these Biden documents “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

News outlets uncritically hyped this claim as fact even though these security state operatives themselves admitted: “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails…are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement -- just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” Even though this claim came from trained liars who, with uncharacteristic candor, acknowledged that they did not “have evidence” for their claim, media outlets uncritically ratified this assertion.

This was a topic I discussed extensively in October when I announced my resignation from The Intercept after senior editors — for the first time in seven years — violated the contractual prohibition on editorial interference in my journalism by demanding I significantly alter my reporting about these documents by removing the sections that reflected negatively on Biden. What I found particularly galling about their pretense that they have such high-level and rigorous editorial standards — standards they claimed, for the first time ever, that my article failed to meet — was that a mere week prior to their censorship of my article, they published an article by a different journalist which, at a media outlet we created with the explicit purpose of treating government claims with skepticism, instead treated the CIA’s claims of “Russian disinformation” as fact. Even worse, when they quoted the CIA’s letter, they omitted the part where even those intelligence agents acknowledged that they had no evidence for their assertion.

 

If A Representation Is "A Bid For Power" Then Google Already Rules The World

doxa.substack |  The other point that’s always stressed in the AI Ethics literature, is that in the hands of large, powerful, status-quo-defining entities like Google, there's a feedback loop: the models are released back into the real world, where they tend to reinforce in some way the very status quo that produced them.

This circularity of status quo => model => status quo is well covered in Cathy O'Neil's 2016 book, Weapons of Math Destruction. O'Neill is mostly concerned with the models used by Big Finance, but the principle is exactly the same — models don't just reflect the status quo, they're increasingly critical to perpetuating it. Or, to borrow words from the title of an even earlier book on financial models by Donald MacKenzie, these models are "an engine, not a camera."

Unless I've missed something major, a very big chunk of the AI Ethics work amounts to stating and restating the age-old truth that big, costly, public representations of the regnant social hierarchy are powerful perpetuators of that very hierarchy. That's it. That's the tweet... and the paper... and the conference... and the discipline.

In the formulation of Gebru's paper, large language models (“large” because they’re trained on a massive, unsanitized corpus of texts from the wilds of the internet) re-present, or "parrot," the roblematic linguistic status quo. And in parroting it, they can perpetuate it.

As people in positions of privilege with respect to a society’s racism, misogyny, ableism, etc., tend to be overrepresented in training data for LMs (as discussed in §4 above), this training data thus includes encoded biases, many already recognized as harmful...

In this section, we have discussed how the human tendency to attribute meaning to text, in combination with large LMs’ ability to learn patterns of forms that humans associate with various biases and other harmful attitudes, leads to risks of real-world harm, should LM-generated text be disseminated.1

As someone who trained as an historian, it's not at all surprising to me that what was true of the Roman Colosseum — in everything from the class-stratified seating arrangement to the central spectacle — is also true of a the massively complex and expensive public display of cultural power that is Google's language model.

Control Of The Most Powerful Politicians And Their Regulators Ensures Control By The Regulated

opendemocracy | From France to Australia to the US state of Maryland, the free press is waging a battle for survival against Facebook and Google. Besides being gushing firehoses of COVID-19 and election disinformation and QAnon conspiracies, another of Google and Facebook’s dangerous impacts is undermining the financial stability of media outlets all over the world. Where is the European Commission and the Biden administration in this fight? A lot is at stake, yet so far they have been quiet as church mice.

How do Google and Facebook threaten free press? These two companies alone suck up an astounding 60% of all online advertising in the US. With Amazon taking another 9%, that leaves a mere 30% of digital ad revenue to be split among thousands of media outlets, many of them local publications. With digital online advertising now comprising over half of all ad spending (and projected to grow further), this has greatly contributed to underfunded and failing news industries in country after country, including in Europe and the US.

Australia and Maryland

Australia’s situation is typical. Its competition commission found that, for every $100 spent by online advertisers in Australia, $47 goes to Google and $24 to Facebook,

even as traditional advertising has declined. Various studies have found that the majority of people who access their news online don’t go to the original news source, instead they access it via Facebook’s and Google’s platforms which are cleverly designed to hold users’ attention. Many users rarely click through the links, instead they absorb the gist of the news from the platforms’ headlines and preview blurbs.

Consequently, Facebook and Google receive the lion’s share of revenue from digital ads, rather than the original news sources receiving it. Note that Facebook and Google could tweak their design and algorithms to purposefully drive users to the original news sources’ websites. But they don’t.

So Australia decided to fight this duopoly with some rules of its own. A new law will require large digital media companies to fairly compensate Australian media companies for re-packaging and monetizing their proprietary news content. Media outlets around the world are watching to see how this plays out.

Google initially fought the proposal, but finally negotiated deals with Australian news publishers, beginning with media magnet Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, to pay them some compensation. But Facebook flexed its digital muscles by cutting off Australia entirely from its platform for several days, preventing Aussie news publishers as well as everyday users, including important government agencies like health, fire and crisis services, from posting, viewing or sharing news content.

The result was jarring, the proverbial ‘shot heard ‘round the world’. Facebook censored Australian users more effectively than the Chinese communist government ever could, prompting charges of ‘big tech authoritarianism’. Facebook finally relented to Australia’s requirement, in return for some vague and uncertain concessions. But the message of raw, naked platform power was unmistakably clear.

 

We Don't Even Need To Pretend Google Had To Show Obama His Location, Search, Or Browsing Histories

politico |  Few moments in the power struggle between Washington and Silicon Valley have inspired more anger and bafflement than one in January 2013, when antitrust regulators appointed by former President Barack Obama declined to sue Google.

The decision still rankles the company’s rivals, who have watched the search giant continue to amass power over smartphones, data-hoovering devices and wide swaths of the internet, unimpeded by laws meant to deter monopolies. It has fueled some lawmakers’ calls to overhaul the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that spent 19 months investigating Google’s efforts to overpower the competition — and critics say, blinked. 

The commission has never disclosed the full scope of its probe nor explained all its reasons for letting Google’s behavior slide.

But 312 pages of confidential internal memos obtained by POLITICO reveal what the FTC’s lawyers and economics experts were thinking — including assumptions that were contradictory at the time and many that turned out to be incorrect about the internet’s future, Google’s efforts to dominate it and the harm its rivals said they were suffering from the company’s actions. The memos show that at a crucial moment when Washington’s regulators might have had a chance to stem the growth of tech’s biggest giants, preventing a handful of trillion-dollar corporations from dominating a rising share of the economy, they misread the evidence in front of them and left much of the digital future in Google’s hands.

The documents also add to doubts about whether Washington is any more capable today of reining in the tech industry’s titans, despite efforts by a new generation of antitrust enforcers to turn up the heat on Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon — all of which now rank among the United States’ wealthiest companies. That will be a crucial test awaiting President Joe Biden’s regulators, including the outspoken Silicon Valley critic he plans to nominate to an open slot on the FTC’s five-person board.

Nearly a decade ago, the documents show, the FTC’s investigators uncovered evidence of how far Google was willing to go to ensure the primacy of the search engine that is the key to its fortunes, including tactics that European regulators and the U.S. Justice Department would later label antitrust violations. But the FTC’s economists successfully argued against suing the company, and the agency’s staff experts made a series of predictions that would fail to match where the online world was headed:

— They saw only “limited potential for growth” in ads that track users across the web — now the backbone of Google parent company Alphabet's $182.5 billion in annual revenue.

 

 

The Unrivaled Power Of Google's Coalition Of The Connected

newsweek |  In this extract from When Google Met WikiLeaks Assange describes his encounter with Schmidt and how he came to conclude that it was far from an innocent exchange of views.

Eric Schmidt is an influential figure, even among the parade of powerful characters with whom I have had to cross paths since I founded WikiLeaks. In mid-May 2011 I was under house arrest in rural Norfolk, England, about three hours' drive northeast of London. The crackdown against our work was in full swing and every wasted moment seemed like an eternity. It was hard to get my attention.

But when my colleague Joseph Farrell told me the executive chairman of Google wanted to make an appointment with me, I was listening.

In some ways the higher echelons of Google seemed more distant and obscure to me than the halls of Washington. We had been locking horns with senior U.S. officials for years by that point. The mystique had worn off. But the power centers growing up in Silicon Valley were still opaque and I was suddenly conscious of an opportunity to understand and influence what was becoming the most influential company on earth. Schmidt had taken over as CEO of Google in 2001 and built it into an empire.

I was intrigued that the mountain would come to Muhammad. But it was not until well after Schmidt and his companions had been and gone that I came to understand who had really visited me.

The stated reason for the visit was a book. Schmidt was penning a treatise with Jared Cohen, the director of Google Ideas, an outfit that describes itself as Google's in-house "think/do tank."

I knew little else about Cohen at the time. In fact, Cohen had moved to Google from the U.S. State Department in 2010. He had been a fast-talking "Generation Y" ideas man at State under two U.S. administrations, a courtier from the world of policy think tanks and institutes, poached in his early twenties.

He became a senior advisor for Secretaries of State Rice and Clinton. At State, on the Policy Planning Staff, Cohen was soon christened "Condi's party-starter," channeling buzzwords from Silicon Valley into U.S. policy circles and producing delightful rhetorical concoctions such as "Public Diplomacy 2.0." On his Council on Foreign Relations adjunct staff page he listed his expertise as "terrorism; radicalization; impact of connection technologies on 21st century statecraft; Iran."

It was Cohen who, while he was still at the Department of State, was said to have emailed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to delay scheduled maintenance in order to assist the aborted 2009 uprising in Iran. His documented love affair with Google began the same year when he befriended Eric Schmidt as they together surveyed the post-occupation wreckage of Baghdad. Just months later, Schmidt re-created Cohen's natural habitat within Google itself by engineering a "think/do tank" based in New York and appointing Cohen as its head. Google Ideas was born.

Later that year two co-wrote a policy piece for the Council on Foreign Relations' journal Foreign Affairs, praising the reformative potential of Silicon Valley technologies as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy. Describing what they called "coalitions of the connected," Schmidt and Cohen claimed that:

Democratic states that have built coalitions of their militaries have the capacity to do the same with their connection technologies.…

They offer a new way to exercise the duty to protect citizens around the world [emphasis added].

 

 

 

If You Think Property Rights ARE Human Rights - You Are A Conservative

"If you think human rights are more important than property rights, you're not a conservative. If you think property rights ARE human rights, you are a conservative."

And second, Frank Wilhoit's: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition…There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

oxforduniversitypress |  Late in life, William F. Buckley made a confession to Corey Robin. Capitalism is "boring," said the founding father of the American right. "Devoting your life to it," as conservatives do, "is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex." With this unlikely conversation began Robin's decade-long foray into the conservative mind. What is conservatism, and what's truly at stake for its proponents? If capitalism bores them, what excites them?

As @CoreyRobin described in THE REACTIONARY MIND, that is the single factor that unites all the strains of conservativism, from Dominionism to Libertarianism to Monarchism to Imperalism: some are born to rule, others, to be ruled over.https://t.co/17jf9MVW8q

5/

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) March 16, 2021

In The Reactionary Mind, Robin traces conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution. He argues that the right was inspired, and is still united, by its hostility to emancipating the lower orders. Some conservatives endorse the free market; others oppose it. Some criticize the state; others celebrate it. Underlying these differences is the impulse to defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality -- while simultaneously making populist appeals to the masses. Despite their opposition to these movements, conservatives favor a dynamic conception of politics and society -- one that involves self-transformation, violence, and war. They are also highly adaptive to new challenges and circumstances. This partiality to violence and capacity for reinvention have been critical to their success.

Written by a highly-regarded, keen observer of the contemporary political scene, The Reactionary Mind ranges widely, from Edmund Burke to Antonin Scalia and Donald Trump, and from John C. Calhoun to Ayn Rand. It advances the notion that all right-wing ideologies, from the eighteenth century through today, are improvisations on a theme: the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back. When its first edition appeared in 2011, The Reactionary Mind set off a fierce debate. It has since been acclaimed as "the book that predicted Trump" (New Yorker) and "one of the more influential political works of the last decade" (Washington Monthly). Now updated to include Trump's election and his first one hundred days in office, The Reactionary Mind is more relevant than ever.

Native Conquest And African Enslavement Foundational To U.S. Property Law

ssrn |  This article demonstrates that the histories of conquest and slavement are foundational to U.S. property law. Over centuries, laws and legal institutions facilitated the production of the two commodities, or forms of property, upon which the colonial economy and the United States came to depend above all others: enclosures of Native nations’ land and enslaved people. By describing the role of property law in creating markets for lands and people, this article addresses the gap between the marginal place of these histories in the contemporary property law canon and the growing scholarly and popular recognition that conquest and enslavement were primary modes of property formation in American history.

First, this article describes how the field of property law has come to omit these histories from its common understanding of what is basic to its subject by examining property law casebooks published over 130 years. For most of their history, it shows, such casebooks affirmed the racial logic of conquest and slavery and contributed to these histories’ suppression in pedagogical materials. Early treatises avowed the foundational nature of conquest, but after the first property law casebook appeared, at the time of the close of the frontier, casebooks for more than half a century emphasized English inheritance, rather than acknowledging colonization’s formative impact on the property system. In the same period, the era of Jim Crow, casebooks continued to include many cases involving the illegal, obsolete form of property in enslaved people; when they ceased to do so, they replaced them with cases on racially restrictive covenants upholding segregation. After several decades, during which the histories of conquest and slavery were wholly erased, casebooks in the 1970s began to examine these histories through a critical lens for the first time. However, the project of understanding their consequences for the property system has remained only partial and highly inconsistent.

The central part of this article focuses on the acquisition of property, which, properly understood, comprises the histories of conquest, slavery, expropriation, and property creation in America. It examines the three main theories of acquisition—discovery, labor and possession-- beginning with the United States’ adoption of the Discovery Doctrine, the international law of conquest, as the legal basis of its sovereignty and property laws. In this context, it shows that the operative principle of the doctrine was not that of first-in-time, as commonly taught, but the agreement of European nations on a global racial hierarchy. Second, it turns to the labor theory, which was selectively applied according to the hierarchy of discovery, and firmly linked ideologies about non-whites and property value. It then reframes the labor theory’s central question—property creation—as a matter of legal and institutional innovation, rather than merely agricultural labor. It examines the correlation between historical production of property value in the colonies to show how the main elements of the Angloamerican land system developed through the dispossession of nonwhites-- the rectangular survey, the comprehensive title registry, headrights and the homesteading principle, laws that racialized the condition of enslavement to create property in human beings, and easy mortgage foreclosure, which facilitated the trade of human beings and land as chattel to increase colonists’ wealth. Third, it assesses how the state organized the tremendous force required to subvert others’ possession of their lands and selves, using the examples of the strategy of conquest by settlement and the freedom quests that gave rise to the fugitive slave controversy. Its analysis highlights the state’s delegation of violence and dispossession to private actors invested in the racial hierarchy of property through the use of incentives structured by law.

This article concludes by summarizing how the laws that governed conquest and slavery established property laws, practices, and institutions that laid the groundwork for transformations to interests in land after the abolition of slavery, which I will address in a future companion article. This article aims throughout to offer a framework for integrating the study of English doctrines regulating relations between neighbors-- the traditional focus of a property law course—into an exploration of the unique fruits of the colonial experiment -- the singular American land system that underpins its real estate market and its structural reliance on racial violence to produce value.

Not All First Language Speakers Trust Gates And Fauci's Forked Tongues

NYTimes |  The coronavirus has been particularly devastating for Indigenous communities. It has killed American Indians and Alaska Natives at nearly twice the rate of white people, and inflicted a cultural crisis by killing the elders who pass down language and traditional teachings. The economic toll of the pandemic has pummeled Native economies already racked by high poverty and unemployment.

The vaccine rollout in Native communities has been a surprising source of strength, especially as vaccinations of other communities, such as Black and Hispanic Americans, continue to lag behind white populations.

Working through the Indian Health Service and long-established networks of tribally run clinics, tribes are outpacing much of the country, already giving shots to healthy adults and eligible teenagers. Some have even thrown open the doors to nontribal members inside their borders.

In all, about 1.1 million vaccines have been distributed through the Indian Health Service and 670,000 have been administered. Still, health care advocates said frustrating gaps remained. Many Indigenous people in big cities and areas without tribal health centers had struggled to find vaccines.

Now, Native health workers are desperately hoping to get through to people like Nora Birdtail, 64, one of a shrinking number of Cherokee-speaking elders. Their names are marked down in a leather notebook that was created to inscribe their importance to Cherokee heritage and culture. Today, the notebook is a register of loss — of at least 35 lives and numberless stories cut short by the virus.

Even as hundreds of elders got vaccinated, Ms. Birdtail resisted. She is vulnerable to the coronavirus from a stroke. Her job as a teacher’s aide brings her into close contact with children at the Cherokee Immersion School, where in-person classes are expected to resume soon.

But Ms. Birdtail is scared of getting vaccinated, largely because she once passed out after getting a penicillin shot years ago. The government’s legacy of medical malpractice in Indian Country — a history of coercive treatments, shoddy care, forced sterilizations and more — has also instilled a deep skepticism about taking a government-supported vaccine.

“It made me think back to the Trail of Tears, how they all got sick,” Ms. Birdtail said. “I don’t trust it.”

 

 

Trust Fauci? Demonized Trump Supporters Will Never Voluntarily Submit To Phase 3 Human Experimentation...,

nbcnews |  Vaccine holdouts could end up being the last obstacle to defeating the pandemic, and a growing effort is aimed at convincing one substantial group of skeptics: Republicans.

While efforts to combat vaccine hesitancy and access have so far been mostly focused on African Americans and Latinos, recent polls suggest the largest group of Americans either hesitant about the Covid-19 vaccine or outright opposed to it are Republicans, and efforts to reach them are only in their infancy.

Success convincing skeptical conservatives could be the difference between the United States reaching herd immunity or not. That's why a group of Republican pollsters and politicians, plus the White House, are all already working on getting the skeptics on board.

Messages targeted at minority groups were overt and discussion of hesitancy among people of color was clear. But when it comes to targeting a partisan population, appearing overtly political opens up new risks and could backfire, those working on the efforts warn.

"Vaccines are our only way out of this. If we don't have 80-plus percent of the population vaccinated before next winter, this virus is going to come back raging," Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee, told NBC News. "What worries me is if 25 percent of Republicans say they won't get vaccinated, that's going to be hard to do."

It's simple math.

Last week, a Monmouth University poll found that 56 percent of Republicans either wanted to wait and see further before getting a vaccine or said they will likely never get one, compared to just 23 percent of Democrats. Another poll, from NPR/PBS/Marist, found that 47 percent of Trump voters and 41 percent of Republicans said they will not get the vaccine when made available to them. And a Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll found the number of Republicans refusing to get the vaccine was 28 percent, while the number of Black Americans and Hispanic Americans who felt that stood at 14 percent and 12 percent respectively.

Together, those groups could leave around a quarter or more of the American population unvaccinated, while scientists now estimate herd immunity will only be reached when 70 to 85 percent of the population carry the virus's antibodies.

"You can't afford to not try to address that," Dr. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, said in an interview.

 

Trust The Experts: According To The Original Plan, We've Got 6 More Months Of Lockdown To Go...,

AIER  |  One year ago, between March 13 and 16, 2020, began what most of us would agree were the most difficult days of our lives. We thought our rights and liberties were more or less secure or could only be hobbled on the margin. We took certain things for granted, such as that our governments would not – and could not – order us to stay home, close most businesses and schools, shut down travel, padlock churches and concert halls, cancel events, much less lock down society in the name of virus control. 

This not-yet-released HHS report on COVID-19 projects an 18-month-long tsunami of nationwide disease and death. The Trump administration could’ve stemmed the tide but looked the other way until it was too late. If he had an ounce of decency, he’d resign. https://t.co/TA8iorcwW5

— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) March 18, 2020

All that changed with a federal document issued March 13, 2020, and declassified three months later. It was the lockdown guidelines. Over the following days, governors panicked. People panicked. Bureaucrats were unleashed. All the powers of the state at all levels of society were deployed not on the virus but on the people, which is all that governments can really control. The lockdowns were nearly universal, implemented around the world but for a few holdouts, one of which was in the US (South Dakota). 

A year later, most states are opening up while those still clinging to lockdowns can no longer control people. Regardless of warnings from the top that going back to normal life is too dangerous, most people have decided to be done with the whole dreadful episode. 

All year we’ve asked ourselves the question: why did this happen? Pathogens are part of life now and always have been. For the better part of a century, social and economic outcomes from new viruses were ever less disruptive. Public health had a settled consensus that disease is something to mitigate through doctor-patient relationships. Taking away people’s rights was out of the question. The last time that was tried in very limited ways in 1918 demonstrated that coercion only distracts, divides, and delays. This is why lockdowns were not attempted for another hundred years. Wisely so. 

In the severe pandemic of 1957-58, officials explicitly said: ‘‘[T]here is no practical advantage in the closing of schools or the curtailment of public gatherings as it relates to the spread of this disease.’’ It was the same in 1968-69, 2006, 2009, and 2012-13. 

Then came 2020 and SARS-CoV-2. The 24-hour news cycle and social media kicked in. Shocking images from China – people dropping dead in streets, police dragging people out of their homes or otherwise sealing whole apartment units – were blasted onto cellphones the world over. Then a part of Italy seemed to erupt. To many, it felt like a plague, and a primitive disease panic took over political culture.

Virus Variants Developed In Those With Compromised Immune Systems

NYTimes |  Growing evidence suggests that people with cancer and other conditions that challenge their immune systems may be incubators of mutant viruses.

The version of the coronavirus that surfaced in Britain late last year was shocking for many reasons. It came just as vaccines had offered a glimpse of the end of the pandemic, threatening to dash those hopes. It was far more contagious than earlier variants, leading to a swift increase in hospitalizations. And perhaps most surprising to scientists: It had amassed a large constellation of mutations seemingly overnight.

A coronavirus typically gains mutations on a slow-but-steady pace of about two per month. But this variant, called B.1.1.7, had acquired 23 mutations that were not on the virus first identified in China. And 17 of those had developed all at once, sometime after it diverged from its most recent ancestor.

Experts said there’s only one good hypothesis for how this happened: At some point the virus must have infected someone with a weak immune system, allowing it to adapt and evolve for months inside the person’s body before being transmitted to others. “It appears to be the most likely explanation,” said Dr. Ravindra Gupta, a virologist at the University of Cambridge.

If true, the idea has implications for vaccination programs, particularly in countries that have not yet begun to immunize their populations. People with compromised immune systems — such as cancer patients — should be among the first to be vaccinated, said Dr. Adam Lauring, a virologist and infectious disease physician at the University of Michigan. The faster that group is protected, the lower the risk that their bodies turn into incubators for the world’s next supercharged mutant.