Daily Sceptic- G20 Ministers Meet in Brazil to Discuss “Disinformation” Censorship Agenda – Leaving No Doubt Over Which Side They’re On
Let That Sink In
BREAKING: X/Twitter’s San Francisco office has officially closed its doors today, the company will be relocating to its new headquarters in Austin, Texas
Should we keep the sign? (parody)
Dust In The Wind
Public- Wind Industry Is Killing Sea Life On East Coast, Fishermen Say
Over the last three years, we have been documenting the ecological catastrophe quietly unfolding on the East Coast. With the support of the US government, the wind industry is killing whales and other sea life. If nothing changes, the wind industry will make the North Atlantic right whale go extinct.
Article is paywalled but there’s enough here to get the point
Commercial fishermen all around Block Island are telling similar stories. Ever since the wind farms came to the ocean, lobsters are hard to find. Formerly productive scallop beds are dead. Cod have disappeared.
Google Commemorative Logos You’ll Never See
Google “growth strategist” Dakota Leazer got confronted by James O’Keefe after telling an undercover reporter that his company had been “definitely coordinating” with the Kamala Harris campaign. He had told the woman, who had set up Leazer on a date, that his platform and other Big Tech companies were promoting Harris in an attempt to “get her to win.” […]
Be sure to watch the whole video, which dropped on Wednesday, the day after the debate. Reasonable people may think Leazer looks a bit too low-level to reach a definitive conclusion about Google’s intentions, and maybe he just was trying to impress his date. Perhaps, but … Google’s actions at higher levels raise exactly the same suspicion.
For instance, did you know that Google’s attorney in their DoJ anti-trust case helped Kamala Harris prep for the debate that took place the night before O’Keefe released this video?
An Amazon Sabotage Goes Horribly Wrong
Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors
Time snubbed tech titan and artificial intelligence backer Elon Musk from its annual list of the “100 Most Influential People in AI” – but slapped actress Scarlett Johansson on this year’s cover.
The magazine created a composite image for its 2024 cover showing the photos of 18 AI leaders, topped by Nvidia boss Jensen Huang that also prominently featured the “Black Widow” star.
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
This is insane.
Can more people replicate this? pic.twitter.com/gz7KH95LVg
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) September 3, 2024
Yes, they could replicate it.
Bavarian Manure Wagon
Let That Sink In
Show Me The Man
Telegram is not just a popular text messaging app; it is an ecosystem that also includes news and expert channels, photo and video sharing, and online communities of all kinds—from local to professional to hobbyist. The app offers encrypted communication that is impossible to crack. The feature seems to be attractive to criminals and terrorists. But regular people—almost 1 billion of them around the world—also enjoy Telegram. To compare: X/Twitter has about 340 million monthly users. Telegram is used by 45% of online users in India, almost 40% in Brazil, 34% in Mexico, and so on.
There is one more specific category of users that particularly values encrypted messaging: political dissidents and protesters. Telegram played a significant role in the 2017-2018 Iranian protests, as more than half of the population there uses the app. The 2020-2021 anti-Lukashenko protests in Belarus were even labeled the “Telegram Revolution,” mirroring the “Twitter revolutions” of 2009-2011.
But there is also another big player in the field: the state. The state wants to know what criminals and terrorists are doing, but also what protesters and regular folks are up to. And so do corporations. As the latest memes go, “Mark Zuckerberg sells people’s personal information, and he is a free man. Pavel Durov doesn’t, and he is in the jail.”
Tonight on Fight Night
I’m Out
Telegraph- Boss of ‘Europe’s answer to Tesla’ quits after sales slump
His resignation comes after sales of the Swedish company’s upmarket electric cars slumped. Global volumes fell 40pc in the first quarter of 2024 to 7,221, down from 12,076 the previous year.
The carmaker, headquartered in Gothenburg in Sweden, lost close to $1.5bn over the course of 2023.
(And That NYPost Laptop Story, Too)
JUST IN – Zuckerberg regrets working with the Biden-Harris administration to censor Covid era information online.
Pavel Durov Arrested In France
Pavel Durov, billionaire co-founder and chief executive of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested at the Bourget airport outside Paris on Saturday evening, TF1 TV said, citing an unnamed source.
Durov was travelling aboard his private jet, TF1 said on its website, adding he had been targeted by an arrest warrant in France.
The 39-year-old is understood to have been travelling from Azerbaijan and was arrested at about 8pm local time (6pm GMT).
Durov was expected to appear in court on Sunday.
The Russia-born entrepreneur lives in Dubai, where Telegram is based, and holds dual citizenship of France and the United Arab Emirates.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov recently revealed to Tucker Carlson that the FBI approached a Telegram engineer, attempting to secretly hire him to install a backdoor that would allow U.S. intelligence agencies to spy on users.
The FBI also hired agents to infiltrate ‘anti-vaxx’ Telegram groups, with FBI contractors creating multiple fake online identities to join chatrooms run by groups opposing vaccine mandates.
Mike Benz provides background.
Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors
Facts are stubborn things.
Washington Post columnist Meghan McArdle ripped the community of fact-checkers who have tried to hold former President Trump accountable during his political career, admitting they’ve ultimately failed to hamper his support and have hurt their own institutions.
The author, a staunch critic of Trump, accused those of trying to prevent the spread of Trump’s “disinformation” of being arrogant and mistaking their own opinion with objective fact. She even accused them of censorship. All of this, she wrote, has ultimately led to voters questioning them and other institutions more than they’ve ever questioned the former president.
“After eight years of all-out disinformation warfare, Trump’s approval ratings are holding up better than public trust in academia and journalism,” McArdle lamented.
The columnist began her piece by describing the idealized mission of the Trump era fact-checkers, saying they “devote themselves to checking the internet for bad facts and bad actors — and especially for the malevolent impulses of Trump.”
However, they didn’t save the world in her estimation. At best, they dinged Trump on some of his bragging and, at worst, they censored true facts in their thirst to correct him.
“Some of their efforts have been useful, including their fact-checking of Trump’s more frenetic flights of fancy,” she said, adding, “But the larger effort has been repeatedly marred when the disinformation experts have acted as censors, suppressing information that turned out to be true and spreading information that was false.”
McArdle provided some of the major examples of this suppression, examples that most of the media participated in at the behest of these fact-checkers.
“Recall when it was ‘misinformation’ to suggest the pandemic might have started in a Wuhan lab. Recollect how a bevy of putative experts assured us that Hunter Biden’s laptop was probably a ‘Russian information operation’ rather than … Hunter Biden’s laptop.”
She added a more recent one, stating, “If these memories have faded, remember that just a couple months ago, we were hearing that videos of President Joe Biden’s obvious decline were actually expert-certified ‘cheap fakes.’”
Related: Journalist Resigns After Being Exposed for Fake, AI-Generated Quotes
Hey There Sugar Pie…
App Store- Genesia – AI Friend & Partner
Genesia AI is the perfect companion for anyone who wants a friend they can always count on. Whether you’re looking for emotional support, a mentor, or just someone to talk to, this app is there for you.
h/t Scott
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self Driving Overlords
Trust the technology: Hackers may have stolen every American’s Social Security number
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
On Saturday, NBC Bay Area reported that San Francisco’s South of Market residents are being awakened throughout the night by Waymo self-driving cars honking at each other in a parking lot. No one is inside the cars, and they appear to be automatically reacting to each other’s presence.
Videos provided by residents to NBC show Waymo cars filing into the parking lot and attempting to back into spots, which seems to trigger honking from other Waymo vehicles. The automatic nature of these interactions—which seem to peak around 4 am every night—has left neighbors bewildered and sleep-deprived.[…]
The lack of human operators in the vehicles has complicated efforts to address the issue directly since there is no one they can ask to stop honking. That lack of accountability forced residents to report their concerns to Waymo’s corporate headquarters, which had not responded to the incidents until NBC inquired as part of its report.
Oops
Telegraph- Self-checkouts have been a self-inflicted disaster for Britain
As customers grow frustrated and shoplifters fill their boots, bosses of grocery giants are finally asking themselves the question customers are asked at self-checkout kiosks every day. Do you wish to continue? Not really, as it turns out. Having ruthlessly replaced cashier staff with self-checkout terminals to speed up purchases and save on wages, boardrooms now want the humans back.
Great Success!
Guardian- Biomass power station produced four times emissions of UK coal plant, says report
The Drax power station was responsible for four times more carbon emissions than the UK’s last remaining coal-fired plant last year, despite taking more than £0.5bn in clean-energy subsidies in 2023, according to a report.