Still installing stuff on my new phone, but very carefully. I just started installing a voice recorder, but it insisted on having access to my pictures, the Internet, my location. Why? Nope.
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems sort of related: A statistics professor was banned from Google. It is looking more and more like the old libertarian argument that we have less to concern with private companies than government is getting a little threadbare when it comes to concentrations of power like this.
Why does Trump hate him so much? Because, as Virginia Postrel points out, Bezos is the anti-Trump:
Trump, who likes his staff to have the right “look,” would never cast a wiry guy who doesn’t hide his lack of hair as a big-time businessman. How can someone only five-foot-nine intimidate people into submission? In Trumpworld, intimidation, not value-creation, is what business is all about.
Bezos also has a sense of humor, often at his own expense, and a famously raucous laugh. Trump is humorless. He certainly doesn’t laugh at himself.
Bezos speaks clearly and has amazing message discipline even by the standards of successful CEOs — something that struck me when I first interviewed him way back in 1996. Trump: not so much.
Trump grew up rich, went to private schools, and had an undistinguished college career. Bezos grew up middle-class, went to public schools, and knocked the top out of Princeton, graduating with highest honors and Phi Beta Kappa in electrical engineering and computer science. One had a rich father; the other has brains.
the indictment is an exercise in omission. No mention of the Awan group’s theft of information from Congress. Not a hint about the astronomical sums the family was paid, much of it for no-show “work.” Not a word about Wasserman Schultz’s keeping Awan on the payroll for six months during which (a) he was known to be under investigation, (b) his wife was known to have fled to Pakistan, and (c) he was not credentialed to do the IT work for which he had been hired. Nothing about Wasserman Schultz’s energetic efforts to prevent investigators from examining Awan’s laptop. A likely currency-transportation offense against Alvi goes uncharged. And, as for the offenses that are charged, prosecutors plead them in a manner that avoids any reference to what should be their best evidence.
As with the IRS, where the hell is Jeff Sessions? He didn’t recuse himself from this. My confidence in our justice system continues to plummet.
Yes, definitely pick a side, but Antifa and fascism are the same side:
Partisans of “pick a side” insist that every mention of violence by both right-wing and left-wing thugs is an exercise in “whataboutism.” That is, an attempt to deflect from one’s own sins by invoking the misdeeds of the opposition. In the case of Donald Trump’s hemming and hawing over Charlottesville, that’s likely true. Asked to comment on a terrorist act by a neo-Nazi at a rally of racists and neo-Nazis who have vocally lent the sitting president their support, an invocation of “many sides” sounds an awful lot like whataboutism intended to shift blame from his friends.
But for those of us already calling out the violent bigots flaunting Nazi imagery, it’s not whataboutism to point out that an alleged alternative isn’t actually an alternative at all—it’s just another version of the same thing. As New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg tweeted from Charlottesville, “The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right. I saw club-wielding ‘antifa’ beating white nationalists being led out of the park.” She later, understandably, changed “hate-filled” to “violent,” since actions are clearer and more important than motivations. And CNN’s Jake Tapper commented that “At least two journalists in Charlottesville were assaulted by people protesting the Klan/Nazi/alt-right rally.”
But is it fair to compare the violent far left in our streets to the violent far right opposing them? The left-wing antifa activists claim to be opposing the powers-that-be.
It’s certainly true that the violent right generally supports President Trump. Given that support, his hesitancy about criticizing even the most extreme Nazi imagery and lethal violence (he did call out “racist violence” two days later, then walked it back) creates the impression that, if he isn’t explicitly sympathetic to the marching morons at Charlottesville, he at least enjoys basking in the scented glow of tiki torches. If we’re balancing dangers on the great scale of suckage, that connection to the White House would seem to make the fascist right the more immediate threat.
But that doesn’t mean we have to pick a competing brand of ideological awfulness as a viable alternative to fascism. The thugs on the left have already proved themselves to be violent and intolerant. There’s no reason to favor one illiberal force over another when our country has a long history based on much different, and much better, political principles.
“Those sailors did not have the basic seamanship skills, but by God, they got their sensitivity, race relations and sexual harassment training,” said Peters, adding that sailors can’t fight without adequate navigational skills.
Another example of how our current drug-regulatory process may be killing people. I may start taking metformin. Since everyone has diabetes these days, I should be able to get a prescription for it.
A brief history of their relationship. I infer that she thinks evangelicals not supporting spaceflight is a problem, because of concern that it could reduce public support for it. Apparently she doesn’t realize that public support is irrelevant to a space future that is funded not by the government, but by private interests, which is what our space future now is.