This isn’t about the courts or even the Supreme Court. This is about State Legislators.

This is the complete livestream of the event from RSBN on YouTube.

Video version on 3speak:

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Field Hearing: Online Platforms and Market Power, Part 5: Competitors in the Digital Economy

Date: Friday, January 17, 2020 – 10:00am
Location: 01/17/2020 10:00 AM MST
Tags: Antitrust

If you want to watch the whole thing, you can here (link). Fox had a good write up. All of the witnesses told compelling stories of how difficult it is to innovate in a market dominated by companies that have grown so huge. Throughout I heard a clear tension between business people who clearly want government to get out of the way and let them innovate, but a recognition that Google, Facebook and Amazon (in particular) have grown unnaturally large and are now a threat to innovation.

I pulled out the following clip by the CTO of software service provider Basecamp, David Heinemeier Hansson. He has decided not to use Facebook for advertising and he explains how that is so difficult to do. It is entirely analogous to a news site or prominent individual who choses not to be active on Facebook or is banned from it for whatever reason.

He’s arguing, and I completely agree with him, Facebook and Google managed to collect and gather a trove of personal information in an early gold rush. Most people had no idea they were handing over something this valuable in aggregate because individually they thought it a fair exchange for shiny beads and services. Amazon is also sitting on a similar power.

I no longer have access to Facebook and I absolutely know that for the kind of blog posts I write, I would receive something like 70% of my traffic from there if I merely had a Facebook mirror of my blog posts. Whether you’re buying adverts using their astonishingly intrusive targeting data, or just trying to have your thoughts heard, Facebook is the giant you can’t ignore. That’s one of the reasons why their ban on crypto advertising had such a devastating effect.

America doesn’t really have the same anti-trust regulations we’re using in Australia for our suit. Which is a pity, they don’t seem to know what to do. Toward the end of the hearing the politicians ask the panel what they suggest: the short version is they really don’t know what to do about it!

You can join the fight against the Tech Goliaths in two ways, you have a no win no fee claim or you wish to help finance the case.

Please join the case if you held crypto and have a claim.

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For the second part I dove headfirst into the fall out from the Soleimani strike a week before. I still think Trump knew exactly what he was doing and I go into some of the details on how these drones operate and why its likely the US had absolute knowledge of who they were hitting. This is the Tablet piece I talked about regarding proxy wars.

Syrian air defence is useless: it will never see Israeli or American planes, all it can ever do is shoot down civilian planes. It’s a shocking disaster that they even have that equipment.

The reason give by Twitter for suspending her account are:

Violating our rules against posting media depicting gratuitous gore.

You may not share excessively graphic media (e.g., severe injuries, torture). Exposure to gratuitous gore can be harmful, especially if the content is posted with intent to delight in cruelty or for sadistic pleasure.

I want to analyse this a bit deeper. When I first met Kay she was only just starting to talk about the terrorist attack that changed her life for ever. Reading her book “The Rage Less Traveled” filled in what she was going through at that time but suffice it to say, I didn’t see this particular picture of her wounds for a long time.

In fact, in the spring of 2016, a few weeks before the Brexit referendum in the UK, I remember a discussion with Kay about whether or not to allow the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper to publish the picture. Eventually Kay decided it was important and necessary. You can see the page from the newspaper with this picture inset bottom right.

It took courage to do that and you should probably know even more about how that picture came to be taken. Knowing Kay, in a way in which no AI and even no moderator at Twitter will ever be able to, I know that this picture is not “posted with intent to delight in cruelty or for sadistic pleasure”. But Twitter have set for themselves an almost impossible task of judging the intent of someone when they post a photograph!

Here’s the extract from Kay’s book that describes how this photograph was taken by a police forensic scientist. During this part, Kay is on serious pain medication and her narrative reflects how her mind was unable to focus and drifted off in all sorts of directions. I’m adding in an exclusive extract from her audio book.

I dream about a company of bald-headed dwarfs, who under the command of my dog Peanut plant sunflower seeds in the Negev Desert. It’s all very pleasant. When I wake up, there is a man with a bald head who has his face in my cleavage. 

Holding a small camera an inch from my chest, his breath tickles my skin. I stare at the specks of sweat on his shiny scalp, then look over at Nurse Olga fidgeting with the drips at the side of the bed. Her hair is pulled back tight. It resembles an onion. I love onions. I love how they feel all papery on the outside, and when the skin is peeled off, they become cool and hard. I can’t eat too many onions though, they make me burp. 

Nurse Olga adjusts the valves and chats away. “This gentleman is from the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Holon. Have you been to Holon, Kay? That’s where the Jewish Agency had the nerve to put us when we arrived in Israel. In those days, Holon wasn’t any more friendly than the Kremlin. We even—”

“Nurse,” says the man, taking his head out of my chest. “Can you take off Kay’s pajamas please, so I can get to her back?” 

While Nurse Olga eases my top off, the man looks past me at the lamp on the headboard. His lips are thick, his forehead high, and his eyes bulge. He gives his best smile and tells me his name is Avi. He doesn’t look like an Avi though, he looks like an explorer, or a philosopher, or a scientist. 

Einstein. I’ll call him Einstein. 

Einstein, who seconds ago had his face in my cleavage, now thanks me in a formal voice for my cooperation and apologizes for the intrusion.

I edge forward so he can get to my back. Even moving a couple of inches brings on the agony of feeling impaled. He grimaces with me and waits for my pain to subside, then embarks on his scientific expedition. He documents what he calls “lacerations.” It sounds exciting. He has an efficient but mysterious method. It involves a tape measure, the camera and a clipboard. Working his way down my side and across my back, he mutters secret formulas to himself, like “two-and-a-half inches,” as if worried he may forget. 

He gives the camera a couple of clicks, puts it down, hurriedly writes on the clipboard and then goes back to the tape measure. It is clammy on my skin and makes me shudder. Camera clicks. Pen scratches. Camera clicks. Pen scratches.

Genius. I am in the presence of genius. 

Engrossed in his mission, Einstein gives me the feeling that he is working on something that will change the world. I wonder what it could be. Whatever it is, I feel quite proud to be part of this great experiment, even though it means being photographed naked from the waist up. 

Nurse Olga resumes her monologue about how, back in the ’90’s, Holon used to be a real dump. But, genius that he is, Einstein is too consumed with his world-breaking discovery. He just says, “Nurse, let me concentrate for a moment, please.” I blink around the room. Einstein must have been so excited at what he discovered that he slipped away without saying goodbye, to carry on working towards his great invention. Olga’s not here anymore either. She must have gone with him. 

And from later on in the book, this photograph is directly part of the evidence used to convict the two terrorists.

He hands them a pile of photographs. “And these are Kay’s injuries.” 

As the judges bend forward to survey the damage, Padan goes into detail. The stenographer types as he speaks. The clicks of the typewriter compete with the traffic. 

“Thirteen machete wounds, a crushed sternum, multiple fractures of ribs, bone splinters in her lungs, a broken shoulder blade and a dislocated shoulder.” 

How can social media scale globally and ever avoid this kind of problem? I don’t have the answer and neither does Twitter or Jack Dorsey.

And just as I’m ready to publish, following Israellycool’s post and tons of tweets, Twitter have reinstated the tweet and reactivated her account. Kay won, as Winston Churchill would say “complete surrender”.

If you really want to understand Al Durah, this set of videos by Richard Landes is ground breaking.

At the end Tommy Robinson is on to explain exactly how much respect he has for the alt-right, alt-Reich and the rest of the ethno-nationalists. Precisely none.

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• Mark Dice Thanksgiving video;
• Mayim Bialik on Thanksgiving.

I think the American Thanksgiving Holiday is terrific. It’s a solid holiday that the whole nation can get behind and a strong binding force. That’s not to say we have to ignore how America came into being and the indigenous cultures and peoples who were there before and who were, in many cases, destroyed. There’s no way to change that now, but hating America for it doesn’t help anyone.

If I’m going to be talking about Indigenous peoples and Indigenous rights, I can’t fail to link to Ryan Bellerose’s seminal article: Who’s Indigenous.

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Unsurprisingly, this bias to the left also extends to a systematic bias against Israel. One key way in which Wikipedia is systematically biased against Israel is related to the website’s fundamental policy that all information presented in its articles be verified through the use of citations to “reliable sources.” The problem, therein, is that on Wikipedia what are considered reliable sources are generally “legacy media” (e.g. The New York Times) and works from academia, both of which are already known for their own systematic bias against Israel.

Within Wikipedia, like in the broader public sphere, matters related to Israel are controversial and fraught with disputes, resulting in a highly disproportionate amount of time and energy being consumed on this subject on the site. Due to these long-standing disputes, Wikipedia has adopted special rules governing editing articles related to the Arab–Israeli conflict (other controversial subjects are also subject to special editing restrictions, including abortion, the Syrian Civil War, and global warming).

Veteran anti-Israel editors are adept at gaming the system by using these special rules to limit the influence and efficacy of pro-Israel editors, if not to get them outright banned from editing in the topic area or from all of Wikipedia.

Incidentally, when I tweeted about this story (which was retweeted by OAN anchor and journalist Jack Posobiec) I got back a typical response from an Israel hater:

You and I both know this is nonsense, since the Israel gov’t pays to have pro-Zionist articles..

This tweeter linked to an old, old video story from 2010 about a single training day to teach people how to edit in Wikipedia. I seem to remember I might have been invited to it. The first person on the video is Naftali Bennet back when he was running Yesha Council which wasn’t a significant Israeli government backed institution even back then. I absolutely know for sure there is no determined or co-ordinated “Zionist” effort paid for by the Israeli government to counter the bias on Wikipedia though I wish there was!

I’ve known for a long time that Wikipedia entries on Israel (and often on Jewish matters too) are very slanted. It’s not always the most obvious of lies but it is every form of deceptive framing, suppression of explanatory background and nearly always geared to make the Israel look bad.

This coincides with something David Collier has just published about a text book used to teach about Israel to UK school children:This book has NO PLACE inside a classroom. It is poisonous – it rewrites history – it whitewashes anti-Jewish violence – and every child who has studied from it – has been exposed to hard-core anti-Zionist revisionist material. Faithfully delivered to them by their teacher, their school and the taxpayer.

‘In August 1929, angry clashes occurred over holy sites in Jerusalem. These grew into 4 days of bloody riots and mob violence throughout Palestine, leaving 133 Jews and 116 Arabs dead.’

Here is one example from the book. The year is 1929.

That is how the ‘school’ book describes the bloody massacres of Jewish communities as Arab mobs ran riot throughout Mandatory Palestine. As ‘Arab / Jew’ clashes:

The comparable fatality count is more than deceptive. The reason 116 Arabs died, is because the British killed them as they tried to stop them massacring Jews.

This trick used with the fatality count is an absolutely textbook (excuse me) method of reframing to demonise Jews and whitewash the actions of those who murder Jews. This is the kind of thing that is all over Wikipedia. Which is why it comes as no surprise in Collier’s full report that some of this textbook is even sourced from Wikipedia (something the school kids are told not to do!).

Now lets cross reference this with something in the New York Times:

In his conference call on Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg said that Facebook had become better able to seek out and remove foreign influence networks, relying on a team of former intelligence officials, digital forensics experts and investigative journalists. Facebook has more than 35,000 people working on its security initiatives, with an annual budget well into the billions of dollars.

“Three years ago, big tech companies like Facebook were essentially in denial about all of this,” said Ben Nimmo, head of investigations at Graphika, a social media analytics agency. “Now, they’re actively hunting.”

Facebook is a huge money spinner: Wikipedia begs for donations (though it has some pretty rich sustaining donors from (left leaning) Silicon Valley.

There is no way Wikipedia can ever invest the fortune that Facebook is spending every year on security and weeding out deceptive content. I would contend that Facebook’s model is heading away from profitability too but its immense market power will ensure that it remains profitable for a long time to come.

I believe Wikipedia is a much bigger problem for anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment than any of the social media fights we hear a lot more about. In many respects, corruption of this kind of long standing reference material is going to be a far bigger societal problem than ephemeral social media posts and adverts.

I also spoke about Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his new push toward free speech (or so he says). There’s a lot more to say on this, I’m listening to him in his Fox News interview as I type this.

If you derive value from my work, please consider donating some value my way. You can find all the details on the donation page.

You can join the fight against the Tech Goliaths in two ways, you have a no win no fee claim or you wish to help finance the case.

Please join the case if you held crypto and have a claim.

You can directly contribute crypto on Fundition. To send fiat currency via PayPal click here. If you want to talk about a large donation, Telegram or email me.

So I responded with a tweet invoking my friend Avi Yemini’s now famous internet meme:

If you don’t know the video you can see that in Avi’s tweet which he put up just a few minutes behind mine:

But what interests me is the utter failure of Google Translate to come up with anything approaching a passable translation of all the insults that were hurled my way by an army of Chinese twitter accounts, bots or not.

I’ll start with just about the only one that Google Translate gets right.

Food seems to be a common theme.

Once again food purchasing, but this time with chess! Is an accusation of playing chess a reference to the cultural revolution and the destruction of the bourgeois middle class?

Now we move on to the medicine section with some capitalism hate thrown in.

Insults about being a poor family man?

And we’ll end with possibly my favourite purely because it is so obviously completely without meaning.

How on earth can anyone claim that the world is anywhere near approaching some kind of useful, general Artificial Intelligence when the wealthiest company in the world can’t even begin to translate what are probably common curses from a language spoken by a billion people?

P.S. if anyone can actually read Chinese characters and give me real translations I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

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I’m talking about how simulations work, what the atmosphere is composed of, what 400 parts per million actually means and why we say that instead of 0.04% even though its the same.

I also make reference to studies of local ground level pollution in Israel during Yom Kippur and how this drops very fast when we stop driving and running industry. That’s one of the reasons I’m optimistic that we can fix whatever man has done and we can live with any changes.

Man is hugely resilient and the planet is too. Together we’ll solve problems only as long as we don’t install political systems and governance that destroy human ingenuity. Installing globalised communistic or socialist systems seems to be what underlies all of those pushing the climate crisis hoax and their Green New Deal and other delusional focusing on CO₂ as the only thing that matters.

In the end I’m optimistic that man can solve all problems of changing climate whether we made it change or not. But not through communism, socialism or globalism and central control.

My previous important discussions on Climate Change: