Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

“A Mass Extinction Event For Startups”

Thursday, January 25th, 2024

The Biden recession and other trends made 2023 a horrible year for startups.

  • “Big startups are shutting down. According to PitchBook, more than 3,000 private venture backed startups failed in the last year.”
  • “Of the startups raising money, 19% were funded at a lower valuation than in prior funding rounds.”
  • “38% of VCs disappeared from dealmaking last year and more than a quarter of a million workers at tech companies were laid off over the same period.”
  • “US corporate bankruptcy filings closed out 2023 with the most filings since 2010. The year has been described as a mass extinction event for startups in the press.”
  • Some of the startup failures Boyle namechecks (Hyperloop, Bird) seemed like stupid ideas from the git-go. “Bird the electric scooter rental company—which was also supposed to reinvent public transportation—filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It was the fastest startup to ever land a billion-dollar valuation, and at its peak was worth two and a half billion dollars. It was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange in September after failing to maintain a market cap of above $15 million dollars for 30 consecutive days.”
  • “Who would have thought that renting scooters to drunk people for a dollar (who would then throw them in a canal on their way home) would be a money losing business? Bird ran up more than $1.6bn in net losses since 2018 before finally running out of money.”
  • Smile Direct Club: $8.9 billion valuation at 2019 IPO. “The stock fell in value over time as the company proved to be unprofitable year after year. The company shut down last month $900 million dollars in debt.”
  • One I never heard of: “The health tech startup Olive AI which reached a peak valuation of $4 billion dollars in 2020 driven by the need for automation in healthcare during the pandemic. The company raised over 900 million dollars from investors. In 2022 the company began laying off staff citing ‘tough economic conditions.’ The company was allegedly trying to raise money when it abruptly shut down in November. Going out of business in 2023 was particularly surprising for a company with AI in its name.” Indeed, AI seems to be the current space where stupid money goes to die.
  • Another one I never heard of: Zume.

    No.

    “Zume – the robot pizza delivery company which had raised $445 million dollars in VC funding, the majority of which came from SoftBank in 2018 at a two and a quarter billion-dollar valuation, shut down this summer.” Stupid, but at least I can see why California companies would invest heavily in food automation with that $16 (and rising) minimum wage.

  • WeWork “set out to revolutionize office real estate – by having an app – which I’m told didn’t work very well, and free beer on tap filed for bankruptcy in November.” I’ve covered WeWork previously.
  • “WeWork and its founder Adam Neumann were the poster boys of how a blitzscaled business model led by a charismatic founder could apply a veneer of technology to an old business idea and attract venture capital funding to achieve a multibillion dollar valuation.”
  • “At its peak, WeWork was valued in private markets at $47 billion dollars. Softbank alone invested 16 billion dollars into the company. Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s founder, allegedly invested his first $4.4 billion dollars in the shared office space company after Neumann gave him a 12-minute tour of a WeWork in 2016. With such a short tour, it’s unlikely that the free beer even had an impact.”
  • “Softbank – run by Masayoshi Son (Japan’s Cathie Wood) was one of the biggest startup investors in the last decade. They invested in all sorts of non tech companies that were made to look like tech in order to attain a sky-high valuation. According to Bloomberg, the SoftBank Vision Fund alone lost $53 billion dollars over the last two years on startup investments.”
  • “We have seen a very difficult period for startups over the last year or two, but it comes in the wake of probably the best period for VC backed startups in decades. During the decade from 2011 to 2021 VC investment in private start-ups grew more than sevenfold, from 46 billion dollars in 2011 to $345 billion dollars in 2021.”
  • “In 2022 when the federal reserve began hiking interest rates, this money began drying up as investors lost their taste for unprofitable, but high growth, investments.”
  • That investment boom was driven by two things: Low interest rates and “a recent history of profitable exits from VC funded startups like Facebook, Google, Whatsapp and Snap meant that investors were suddenly paying a lot of attention to tech startups – hoping to repeat those successes.”
  • “Venture capital went from being a small asset class run out of offices on Sand Hill Road that had burned investors in the dot com bubble to a massive global asset class like hedge funds or private equity.”
  • The Flu Manchu lockdowns brought investment from “‘working from home’ companies like Zoom and Peloton.” I always thought of Peloton as a lifestyle luxury brand.
  • “People were using apps like Uber and DoorDash for food delivery, and booking rentals on Airbnb to get out of big cities now that they no longer had to turn up in the office.”
  • “While the prior wave of profitable high growth tech stocks had been (one way or another) in the advertising space, or in businesses like cloud computing, the new wave of startups had untested business models—gig economy businesses which attracted a lot of competition and might never flip to profitability—or robot-made pizza which would be cooked on route to a customer’s home.”
  • “A lot of the VC’s possibly believed in many of the questionable investments that have since gone bust, but a venture capital fund isn’t really there to hold on to these investments until the underlying business flips to profitability. They invest at the idea stage with the goal of selling these businesses on to the public when the hype is at its peak.”
  • “They did manage to unload a number of the biggest flops like WeWork – but not at the valuations they were hoping for, and have found themselves holding the bag on a lot of investments that they bought into at peak valuation.”
  • “The huge valuations many of these companies were attaining in the private market may have been more of a function of how much money had flowed into the private tech startup market since 2011 rather than necessarily reflecting the quality of these companies and their business models.”
  • “According to Erin Griffith at The New York Times, $27.2 billion dollars in VC funding had gone into the 3,200 venture-backed companies that went out of business in the first 11 months of 2023.” And that’s just the firms trackable on PitchBook. The true total is almost certainly higher.
  • “That 27.2 billion dollar number excluded many of the largest startup failures that went public, like WeWork, or that found buyers at much lower prices than VC investors had invested at.”
  • “The hype around AI that we have seen in the last year has masked a lot of the losses in the tech space.”
  • “Meta was up 178 percent last year due to a combination of AI hype and cost cutting within their core business. This covers up the 46.5 billion dollars lost on the Metaverse – which no one will venture into, for fear that they run into Mark Zuckerberg.” I strongly suspect that a lot of those VR losses are actually money siphoned off for something else.
  • Despite this, stocks like Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia have hit all-time highs.
  • “One of the negative economic effects of startup shutdowns is that in such an environment it becomes harder for founders with good business ideas to get funding.”
  • “According to PitchBook, the number of active investors in US Venture Capital, which was defined as firms that made two or more deals in the last year, plummeted by 38% in the first three quarters of 2023 compared to the same period the prior year.”
  • Many of the startup failures were zombie companies, those that should have failed earlier but were kept alive by VC money and low interest rates.
  • “No one wants to see firms going out of business, especially startups which are often the most exciting and innovative firms, but if a business model makes no sense, or only works in a zero-interest rate environment, then its disappearance means that capital can again flow in the direction of the best businesses.”
  • (Previously.)

    The startup bust has direct negative effects on me personally, as I’m still between technical writing positions, and a lot of the jobs I’ve gotten over the past two decades have been with startups.





    LinkSwarm For December 15, 2023

    Friday, December 15th, 2023

    Hamas gets flushed. Stupid Jackson Lee loses the Houston mayoral runoff, and a whole lot of irony. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • House Republicans authorize impeachment inquiry against Biden.
  • Hamas is finally enjoying the enema of the state.

    Israel has begun the process of flooding the network of tunnels beneath Gaza in an effort to flush out the impacted Hamas assets lodged there, according to U.S. officials who spoke to the Wall Street Journal. The Israeli military operation has so far involved the installation of seven massive pumps and testing the process of flooding the Hamas holes with water from the Mediterranean Sea, and now the great enema has begun in earnest.

    “Israeli officials say that Hamas’s underground system has been key to its operations on the battlefield,” explains WSJ. “The tunnel system, they say, is used by Hamas to maneuver fighters across the battlefield and store the group’s rockets and munitions, and enables the group’s leaders to command and control their forces. Israel also believes some hostages are being held inside tunnels.”

    The tunnel system has been dug throughout much of Gaza and is also active at the Egyptian border, the crossing at which Hamas militants smuggle many of their weapons into Gaza. It is a critical infrastructure for the terrorists’ ability to continue to wage their bloody war against the only democracy in the region. Remove the network of tunnels from the table, and you severely cripple that ability.

    Hamas is exactly the sort of thing that should be flushed. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • McThag runs the numbers and says inflation is running much, much hotter than the Biden Administration admits.

    Thanks to Home Alone and Irish we know that a particular cart of groceries went from $19.83 in 1990 to $77.28 today.

    389.7% inflation over 33 years.

    Annualized, that’s just 4.208% inflation, since the goal is 3%, that doesn’t seem so bad.

    The problem is that cart of goods was $44.40 last year. That’s an annual inflation of 2.4755% from 1990 to 2022. Below the Fed’s desired rate, good for us, bad for the national debt.

    That means we had 174% inflation in one fucking year.

    Did you get a 174% raise last year? I didn’t.

  • CDR Salamander says it was foolish to expect a short Russo-Ukrainian War.

    A common problem, one that well pre-dates the invasion of Ukraine, is that we have shockingly well credentialed people of influence from both parties who have an inability to understand that Russians are not Westerners. They don’t think like Westerners, though they may look like them.

    The Russians have a distinct culture, history, and view of themselves and their place in history. The underperforming political, military, and diplomatic elite in the West – with few exceptions outside the former Warsaw Pact nations now in NATO – expect Russians to react in the same way and to the same degree to the incentives and disincentives that move needles and preferences in DC and Brussels.

    Time is always on the side of Russia, which is one of the reasons the slow rolling of weapons to Ukraine has been an exercise of malpractice of the highest degree. You are either in or out.

    Two years on, “we” still are not sending a clear signal. It is amazing, really; in military might, GDP, demographics and a whole host of other reasons, Russia should not be as resilient as they are … which is why DC & Brussels are being played so hard. They still do not understand Russia.

    Even after 1,000 years of experience, we have Western leaders who refuse to believe that the Russians are fundamentally different than the West is in the 21st Century. You can’t put the cultural ability to absorb damage and brutal patience you cannot see in some metric that can go on a PPT slide.

    What the Russians lack in so many other places, they make up for here. As such, this critical part of understanding Russian motivation keeps being missed. Yes to their economy and apocalyptic demographics. Yes to all that.

    For all the reasons Russia continues to fight, so too do their Ukrainian brothers – demonstrating greater resilience and endurance that Western expectations.

    The time for leaving Ukraine to its fate is long past. Yes, the West has a short attention span and is suffering under the dead hand of entrenched leaders with a defeatist mindset – but none of this is written.

    Ukraine can still win – or at least something that can be called a win. It would help if the Russians had some internal issues that required more attention that Ukraine, but even then – all is not worth shrugging over.

    Yes, I’ve seen the math – the metrics – but war is informed by math, but not defined within it.

    At a relatively modest cost in our treasure and almost none of our blood, we are wearing down Russia’s ability to project power for a generation, perhaps two. Perhaps many more generations should demographic instability mate with political instability. The Ukrainians – facing the same economic and demographic challenges as the Russians – are up for the fight. There is no reason for more comfortable nations who have supported them so far to go wobbly at half-time.

  • “FBI Official Who Helped Launch Trump-Russia Probe Sentenced to Four Years in Prison for Work with Russian Oligarch…In August, Charles McGonigal, a 22-year veteran of the bureau’s field office in New York, was found guilty of a count of conspiracy for working with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire with close ties to President Vladimir Putin.”

    Jagged Little Pill is now 28 years old. I don’t think I’ve listened to it for the last 27.

  • “Texas Sen. John Whitmire Defeats Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee for Mayor of Houston.”

    Texas Sen. John Whitmire (D-Houston) has won a resounding victory over U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX-18) in a runoff election for mayor of Houston, carrying the race by 64 percentage points according to election results.

    “Voters have spoken and I am humbly grateful to the people of Houston for electing me as their next mayor,” said Whitmire in a statement.

    The election results largely mirrored the latest polling in the race where Whitmire maintained a lead over Jackson Lee, especially in runoff scenarios where negative perceptions of the congresswoman indicated many voters who had supported one of the other 18 candidates in the first round would likely move strongly towards Whitmire. Polls also indicated crime and public safety were among the top concerns for Houstonians — an issue on which Whitmire, as the longtime chair of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, held a distinct advantage over Jackson Lee.

    I didn’t follow that race closely because it’s been obvious for a long time that Lee simply isn’t very bright, something even the lefty sorts at the Daily Beast noticed.

  • Actually, conservative groups racked up a number of wins in Houston’s elections this year.

    In the Democratic-leaning Houston, Republican-backed candidates have slightly increased their presence on the 16-member city council with the help of the local party, outreach efforts into minority communities, and campaign efforts from conservative organizations.

    According to unofficial election results, candidates Julian Ramirez, Willie Davis, and Twila Carter all won runoff elections for At-Large Positions 1, 2, and 3, and incumbent Mary Nan Huffman handily fended off a challenge from attorney Tony Buzbee for District G. The victors will join incumbent Amy Peck, who ran unopposed for District A, and Fred Flickinger, who won the District E seat on Election Day last month.

    Each of the five contested candidates have enjoyed the support of the Harris County Republican Party (HCRP), the Republican Party of Texas, and groups like the Kingwood Tea Party.

    Pundits frequently forget that not so long ago, Houston was a Republican stronghold. Ted Cruz won Harris County (albeit it narrowly) in 2012, and Greg Abbott carried it in 2014.

  • Trump holds a record lead in Iowa.
  • Planned Parenthood Received Nearly $2 Billion in Federal Funding over Three-Year Span, Congressional Probe Finds.” The proper amount should be “Zero.”
  • 64% of Palestinian refugees taken in by Denmark in 1992 now have criminal records.
  • “Elon Musk took another shot at Disney CEO Bob Iger Thursday, after the state of New Mexico sued Meta for allegedly enabling child sexual abuse and trafficking – yet Disney and other woke advertisers, who paused advertising on X in a kneejerk reaction to claims of antisemitism – apparently have no problem when it comes to the sexual exploitation of minors.”
  • How the Deep State’s censorship apparatus worked to worked to censor free speech during the 2020 election.
  • Spring Branch ISD Teacher Accused of Sexual Relationship with Student. Stephen Griffin taught at Memorial High School and is facing 2 to 20 years in prison.”
  • Worse, a teacher at Fort Bend ISD was arrested for sex trafficking.
  • Woke coffee shop employees fired for harassing Jewish customer. Good.
  • Once again, Communist China tries to ban Christmas and fails miserably.
  • Someone stole $100K of Dr Pepper syrup. Get a rope…
  • A black scholar Harvard President Claudine Gay plagerized is plenty pissed off.

    One of the academics who was plagiarized, former professor Carol Swain, is pissed after Harvard gave Gay a pass on what would have resulted in severe punishment and/or expulsion for anyone else, as Townhall’s Christopher Rufo reports.

    “I rarely get angry, but I am angry,” Swain wrote on X. “[R]ight now about the racial double standards that are TEMPORARILY giving #ClaudineGay an opportunity to resign. White progressives created her and white progressives are protecting her. The rest of us have had to work our rear ends off to achieve success. Some get it handed to them.”

    Rufo interviewed Swain, who said that the plagiarism went far beyond a few paragraphs – and that Gay’s “whole research agenda, her whole career, was based on my work.”

    “She became president of Harvard and got recognition as being its first black president. I don’t believe her record warranted tenure, and I believe that I had to meet a much higher standard than she did,” she told Rufo, adding “Something changed in the mid-1990s, [when] we were having a big affirmative action debate.”

    Rufo asked Swain what she thought would happen to a white person under these circumstances, to which she replied “A white male would probably already be gone.”

    Harvard announced that Gay would keep her job after a week of calls for her ouster, first, regarding her refusal to condemn calls for violence against Jews on campus, and then, after the plagiarism accusations broke. Despite a donor revolt spearheaded by billionaire Bill Ackman, a petition signed by 700 faculty members on Gay’s behalf won in the end.

  • LADDER FIGHT! (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Turkish MP has heart attack after saying Israel will ‘suffer the wrath of Allah’ in Parliament.” I’ve already used the Alanis Morissette meme…
  • “Hedge fund Muddy Waters on Wednesday revealed a bet against a publicly listed real estate investment trust managed by private equity giant Blackstone.” Huge tracts of commercial real estate are vacant, and in places like New York City, that’s long been the case before Flu Manchu struck.
  • IBM President caught on tape pushing illegal racist hiring quotas.
  • Mark Miller and comic store owner stand up to comic cancel culture.
  • Popular Science isn’t.
  • Andre Braugher, RIP. He was great in Homicide.
  • Three-D printed Nerf dart minigun actually shoots faster than an actual Minigun.
  • “Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter Team Up For New Movie Where Everyone Is Pale And Weird.”
  • “Children On Best Behavior After Santa Announces Naughty Kids Now Receive The Marvels On Blu-Ray.”
  • Explaining The Sam Altman/OpenAI Thing

    Tuesday, December 5th, 2023

    Hey, remember that whole “Sam Altman fired as CEO/reinstated as CEO of OpenAI” thing a couple of weeks ago? Here’s the archive story.

    Sam Altman was reinstated late Tuesday as OpenAI’s chief executive, successfully reversing his ouster by the company’s board last week after a campaign waged by his allies, employees and investors, the company said.

    The board would be remade without several members who had opposed Mr. Altman.

    “We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo,” OpenAI said in a post to X, formerly known as Twitter. “We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.”

    The return of Mr. Altmanand the potential remaking of the board, capped a frenetic five days that upended OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT chatbot and one of the world’s highest-profile artificial intelligence companies.

    “i love openai, and everything i’ve done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together,” Mr. Altman said in a post to X. “with the new board and w satya’s support, i’m looking forward to returning to openai, and building on our strong partnership with msft.”

    OpenAI’s board surprised Mr. Altman and the company’s employees on Friday afternoon when it told him he was being pushed out. Greg Brockman, the company’s president who co-founded the company with Mr. Altman and others, resigned in protest.

    The ouster kicked off efforts by Mr. Altman, 38, his allies in the tech industry and OpenAI’s employees to force the company’s board to bring him back. On Sunday evening, after a weekend of negotiations, the board said it was going to stick with its decision.

    But in a head-spinning development just hours later, Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest investor, said that Mr. Altman, Mr. Brockman and others would be joining the company to start a new advanced artificial intelligence lab.

    Nearly all of OpenAI’s more than 700 employees signed a letter telling the board they would walk out and follow Mr. Altman to Microsoft if he wasn’t reinstated, throwing the future of the start-up into jeopardy.

    Four board members — Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI founder; Adam D’Angelo, the chief executive of Quora; Helen Toner, a director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology; and Tasha McCauley, an entrepreneur and computer scientist — had initially decided to push Mr. Altman out.

    Well, here’s Patrick Boyle to provide some context:

    A few takeaways:

  • There are two OpenAIs: “The non-profit OpenAI, Inc. registered in Delaware, and its for-profit subsidiary OpenAI Global, LLC.”
  • Musk was an early, and big, investor in the non-profit. “The founders pledged over one billion dollars to the venture, but actually only contributed around $130 million dollars- the majority of which came from Elon Musk.”
  • When he felt OpenAI was falling behind in 2018, he wanted to take over OpenAI himself. When the board rejected that, he resigned and took future pledged money with him, which blew a huge hole in their budget. (Whatever you think of Musk, I don’t think not being busy enough is his problem.)
  • Then came the for-profit doppelganger.
  • “The profits being capped at 100 times any investment.”
  • “The company explained this decision saying, ‘We need to invest billions of dollars in the coming years into large-scale cloud compute, attracting and retaining talented people, and building AI supercomputers.’ This transition from nonprofit to for-profit required OpenAI to balance its desire to make money with its stated commitment to ethical AI development.”
  • “This unconventional structure meant that Open AI had a board of directors, which in theory controls the entire corporate structure (which includes the charity and the capped profit company) – but which unlike other boards is not accountable to shareholders. The directors are in fact not allowed to own any stock to prevent a conflict of interest, because they are specifically not supposed to be aligned with shareholders.”
  • “The companies operating agreement – to investors – says – in writing: ‘It would be wise to view any investment in OpenAI in the spirit of a donation, with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world.’ Documents like this – that were written by an actual lawyer – highlight the problems we are starting to see from the combined popularity of science fiction in Silicon Valley and widespread microdosing of hallucinogens.”
  • “In the real world, where the role of money is reasonably well defined, Open AI is an unprofitable company and is expected to need to raise a lot more money over time from investors like Microsoft, to keep up with the high costs of building more sophisticated chatbots.”
  • “Despite this lack of profitability, the company is valued by investors at 86 billion dollars, and Bloomberg reported last weekend that ‘some investors were considering writing down the entire value of their OpenAI holdings to zero.'”
  • “Former colleagues would have an open door to follow and join a new AI unit, according to Microsoft chief Satya Nadella. As much of a win as this might have appeared for Microsoft (people were saying that they had managed to buy the hottest AI firm for zero), this might not have been the optimal outcome for them, as they would likely have had to deal with antitrust regulators and lawsuits from other Open AI investors.”
  • “The majority of Open AI’s 700 or so employees signed an open letter to the board demanding that the board resign and that they rehire Altman. The letter stated that the board had told the employee leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed ‘would be consistent with the mission.’ The employees said that unless their demands were met, they would resign from Open AI and join the new subsidiary of Microsoft being headed up by Altman and Brockman.”
  • “You have to wonder what the employee contracts at Open AI look like that the entire staff could leave to work for a major investor in the company leaving Open Ai as an empty shell.”
  • “Typically, executives like Altman would have contracts that prevent them from hiring away key staff once they are no longer at the firm, and staff would have signed NDA’s preventing them from taking any technology with them.”
  • “The OpenAI story is a bit of a crazy one, where Microsoft and a number of other sophisticated investors agreed to put billions of dollars in, and employees got stock grants, all at an $86 billion valuation, without the contractual or fiduciary rights that investors might normally expect.”
  • Rival Anthropic has a similar structure.
  • “Bad corporate governance has been a growing issue particularly in Silicon Valley where companies like Google, Facebook and Snap structured their IPO’s such that founders were left with unchallenged power to do almost anything that they want.” Google and Facebook are garbage companies, but there are some scenarios where only founders can keep the company on a long-term vision rather than goosing quarterly profits (Jobs at Apple comes to mind).
  • Warren Buffet has a similar mechanism (A shares of stock only he controls) to keep control of Berkshire Hatheway.
  • “Since you are buying shares of companies in perpetuity, leadership who are not accountable to shareholders can take value destructive paths without answering to anyone. Meta’s Reality Labs division, which houses its efforts to build the metaverse, has lost around $46.5 billion dollars since 2019. Would Mark Zuckerberg have been able to waste this much money if he was accountable to investors?” I have a fairly strong suspicion that division is being used to hide all sorts of shenanigans.
  • Boyle is deeply suspicious of “stakeholder capitalism” as opposed to the old-fashioned, profit-maximizing kind.”
  • The thing missing from this summary, and all the coverage of the story I’ve seen, is why Altman was originally let go, and none of the principals involved seem to be talking about it…

    Meta Rips Off The Author And Passes The Savings On To Skynet

    Wednesday, September 27th, 2023

    It turns out that Meta, AKA Facebook, used a giant database of pirated books known as “book3” for their AI generative training efforts.

    Indeed, you can now search an index to see who was ripped off.

    Did they rip me off? Not by name, as I have no published novels, but they did ripoff Mike Ashley’s The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction, which has my story “Crucifixion Variations” in it, so yeah.

    They ripped off Howard Waldrop:

  • Dream Factories and Radio Pictures
  • Going Home Again: Stories
  • Horse of a Different Color
  • Other Worlds, Better Lives
  • Things Will Never Be the Same
  • They ripped off a whole lot of Joe R. Lansdale.

    They ripped off a whole lot of George R. R. Martin (in multiple languages).

    There’s already been a lawsuit filed against Meta by Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman and Christopher Golden over using their material for training AIs, but there seems to be no mention of pirated books or book3.

    The fact that Meta is not only training AI on author’s works without their permission, but using pirated copies to do so adds insult to injury.

    And probably additional monetary damages from the resulting lawsuits.

    I expect the latest piracy revelations to lead to whole host of new lawsuits…

    LinkSwarm for August 4, 2023

    Friday, August 4th, 2023

    More Biden Crime Family evidence surfaces, another mysterious Chinese bio-lab (this one much closer to home than Wuhan), more blue city real estate disaster, and Tim Scott screws up. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

    

  • “Joe Biden Allegedly Interacted With Son’s Clients More Than 200 Times.”

    President Joe Biden vehemently denied ever talking business with his son, “or with anyone else” in the run-up to the 2020 election. In fact, Biden even fat-shamed an Iowa voter who approached the subject during the Democratic primaries. On the debate stage with Donald Trump, the former vice president peddled conspiracies of Russian interference when emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop revealed otherwise.

    On Sunday night, the New York Post reported on anticipated testimony from Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Devon Archer. The 48-year-old who went golfing with the Bidens in 2014 is expected to tell the House Oversight Committee how Hunter Biden put his father in contact with foreign businessmen and potential investors at least 24 times. According to the Post, such meetings were either in person or by speakerphone, with Hunter Biden often dialing in Joe.

    Beyond those meetings, there are more than 180 other episodes where the president interacted with his son’s business partners, contrary to his campaign claims of “absolute” separation.

  • Multiple Banks Filed Over 170 ‘Suspicious Activity’ Reports On The Bidens.”

    As the evidence for at least an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden mounts, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and co-host Ben Ferguson discussed the latest bombshell – 170 suspicious activity reports (SARs) from six banks over the past few years – on their podcast with House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY).

    As Townhall reports, these SARs are submitted and sent to the Treasury Department when banks “have a strong suspicion” that a crime has been committed, so as to protect the bank.

    As Comer emphasized, these are submitted “very seldom.”

    If someone were to have two, the chairman explained, it would be hard for that person to open up a bank account.

    Submitting an SAR, Comer added, also is “inviting the regulators to come in and regulate,” which is the last thing banks want.

    The 170 reports are thus quite significant.

  • And still more Biden corruption news: “Devon Archer’s full testimony released.”

    The full transcript from Devon Archer’s sworn testimony before the House Judiciary Committee from Monday, July 31, has been released. During that testimony, Archer told Rep. Dan Goldman that Hunter Biden had been placed on the board of directors for Ukrainian energy company Burisma in order to “legally” intimidate people.

    During that question period, Goldman asked Archer “So based on everything you saw, heard, and observed, did you have any knowledge of Joe Biden having any involvement with Burisma?”

    Archer said that while he did not have “direct” knowledge, it was his view that Burisma would not last were in not for Joe Biden’s involvement. “My only thought is that I think Burisma would have gone out of business if it didn’t have the brand attached to it. That’s my, like, only honest opinion,” Archer said. He went on to say that the company was able to survive for as long as it did because Hunter was on the board.

    “Just because of the brand,” Archer said. The “brand” refers to the Biden name. Speaking with The Post Millennial, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said that the brand was not only Biden, but the vice presidency during Biden’s tenure.

    “How does that have an impact?” Goldman asked.

    “Well, the capabilities to navigate D.C.,” Archer said, “that they were able to, you know, basically be in the news cycle. And I think that preserved them from a, you know, from a longevity standpoint. That’s like my honest—that’s what I—tht’s like how I think holistically.”

    “But how would that work?” Goldman asked.

    “Because people would be intimidated to mess with them,” Archer replied.

    “In what way?” Goldman pressed.

    “Legally,” Archer said.

    Archer also spoke about the meetings during which Joe Biden would call in, or be called. “He put him on speakerphone, again, occasionally. Specifics, like, you know, dinner—you know, dinners occasionally.” Archer was asked to describe the dinners, and said “I remember a dinner in Paris with a French energy company that was—we were speaking to an advisor, and then—we were speaking to. And it was really a Rosemont Seneca Advisors type of—a Rosemont Seneca Advisors kind of a pitch, at the end of the day. And there was a talk, and he said that we’re at this—you know, we’re at this restaurant in Paris, and he put him on the speaker. So that did happen. There were other people there.”

    That dinner, specifically, was attended by “myself; Hunter; Eric Schwerin; and then the executives from the French energy company,” Archer said.

    Another was in “Beijing, at, you know, some restaurant,” Archer said, “—or Chengdu or something like I don’t remember the—I don’t remember specifics. This was just—it was not—t was like a, you know—especially with the time zone difference, there was—you know, there were meetings where his dad would call and he would be talking to him or put him on speaker. I’m not going to—you know, that’s—that happened.”

    Archer said that the conversation at that dinner, with Jonathan Li, was primarily niceties. But it was his contention that getting the vice president on the phone, showing off that kind of access, was what those calls were all about. Archer testified that Hunter Biden would say things like “Hey, guys, my dad’s on the phone.”

    Another call, which Archer revealed during questioning by Rep. Jim Jordan, took place in Dubai. During this impromptu meeting, Hunter Biden was contacted by Burisma’s CEO Zlochevsky, who said “We’re under pressure. We need to go—we want to talk to Hunter.” Hunter called DC, and Archer was “not in the earshot” of that call.

    It was only 5 days after that call that Joe Biden “has a trip to the Ukraine, and he makes a statement: ‘It’s not enough to set up a new anti-corruption bureau and establish a special prosecutor fighting corruption. The Office of the General Prosecutor desperately needs reform.” That was in 2015, and Biden withheld $1 billion in loan guarantees from Ukraine until such time as the prosecutor Viktor Shokin was fired.

    The full transcript is here.

  • Know who else is squealing on the Biden Crime Family? Jill Biden’s ex-husband.

    Bill Stevenson, who was married to Jill Biden between 1970 and 1975, told Newsmax last week that the president’s brother, Frankie Biden, tried to intimidate him during his divorce with Jill, and claimed the family threatened him with repercussions.

    “Frankie Biden of the Biden crime family comes up to me and he goes, “Give her the house or you’re going to have serious problems,”” Stevenson said. “I looked at Frankie and I said, “Are you threatening me?” and needless to say, about two months later, my brother and I were indicted for that tax charge for $8,200.”

    When asked to clarify whether he thinks Joe Biden was behind the tax charge, Stevenson told host Greg Kelly: “I not only think it, but I know it,” adding that he “could not believe the power of Joe Biden and the Department of Justice. I couldn’t believe it.”

    Kelly also noted the parallels between Stevenson’s case and Hunter Biden’s ongoing tax troubles – noting that Hunter was hit with just two misdemeanor counts for $2.2 million in unpaid taxes, while Stevenson and his brother were slapped with two felonies for just over $8,000 in unpaid taxes.

  • This is a weird, disturbing story: Mysterious Chinese bio-lab discovered in Reedley, CA in the central San Joaquin Valley.

    Court documents detail the horrors and dangerous nature of an illegal lab found in Reedley, California, exposed several months ago by a city code enforcement officer. What was found inside prompted the fire chief to send a letter to city officials describing it as a “potential disaster for the city.”

    An investigation into the warehouse was prompted by a simple garden hose that was illegally attached and coming out of a wall in the back of the building.

    “Frankly, we knew that should not have been there and when she went to investigate, she found that there was activity or operation or something happening within that building,” said Reedley City Manager Nicole Zieba.

    The city then obtained a search warrant to look inside what should have been an ordinary warehouse. Inside, they found thousands of vials, many of which contained bio-hazardous materials like human blood, and other unknown substances.

    “There was over 800 different chemicals on site in different bottles of different acids. Unfortunately, a lot of these are being categorized under ‘unknown chemicals,’” said Assistant Director of the Fresno County Department of Public Health Joe Prado. “A lot of these labels have been removed from bottles so there was only so much testing we could do [on] those chemicals.”

    Health officials also discovered nearly 1,000 lab mice, 200 of which were dead.

    Prado said the warehouse occupants claimed they were “doing some testing on laboratory mice that would help them support [and develop] the COVID test kits that they had on-site.”

    According to court documents, officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tested what they could and determined that at least 20 potentially infectious viral, bacterial, and parasitic agents were present, including E. coli, malaria, and the virus that causes COVID-19.

    What. The. Hell?

  • “Biden White House asked Facebook to tweak algorithm to push mainstream over conservative news.” Of course they did. That’s viewpoint discrimination.
  • “Scientists Call for Full Retraction of Nature’s Proximal Origin Paper, as Fraud Accusations Mount.” Their response was simplicity itself: They lied.

    A growing number of people, including prominent scientists, are calling for a full retraction of a high-profile study published in the journal Nature in March 2020 that explored the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

    The paper, whose authors included immunology and microbiology professor Kristian G. Andersen, declared that evidence clearly showed that SARS-CoV-2 did not originate from a laboratory.

    “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the authors wrote in February.

    Yet a trove of recently published documents reveal that Andersen and his co-authors believed that the lab leak scenario was not just possible, but likely.

    “[The] main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario,” Andersen said to his colleagues, according to a report from Public, which published a series of Slack messages between the authors.

    Anderson was not the only author who privately expressed doubts that the virus had natural origins. Public cataloged dozens of statements from Andersen and his co-authors—Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes, and Robert F. Garry—between the dates January 31 and February 28, 2020 suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 may have been engineered.

    ” …the fact that we are discussing this shows how plausible it is,” Garry said of the lab-leak hypothesis.

    “We unfortunately can’t refute the lab leak hypothesis,” Andersen said on Feb. 20, several days after the authors published their pre-print.

  • Ukrainian naval drone hits Russian Ropuha-class landing ship Olenegorski Gornjak. The ship may not have sank, but was seen listing heavily, so is likely out of action for a while.
  • “George Soros-tied fund, Fortress buy bankrupt Vice Media for $350M.” Evil money after bad…(Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • Sadly, I think Kurt is right on the money here: “Tim Scott Is Too Soft to Be Our Nominee.”

    The rap on Tim Scott is that he is too nice to be a modern Republican, but that’s wrong – he’s too weak to be a modern Republican. The man consistently defaults to submission to the woke left, but the times call for a warrior and his brand is soft surrender. Yeah, it would be nice to live in an era where we have the luxury of a president who dodged the draft in the culture wars, but we do not live in that time. Tim Scott needs to stay right where he is, an affable but unaccomplished senator firmly within the tradition of the political puffballs that South Carolina’s GOP inexplicably turns out. Let him be nice somewhere where his alleged niceness won’t shaft us again.

    It could have been different, but that would require a different man than Tim Scott. There are moments that define a candidate, moments where they have a choice and the choice they make makes or breaks them. Kamala Harris decided to take what is essentially a footnote within the Florida history standards and contort it into some sort of lie about how Ron DeSantis loves slavery. It’s one of those issues where the claim is so facially ludicrous that you have to wonder if Kamala is stupid or cynical – and come to the conclusion that she is probably both. But she went with it and DeSantis pushed back and we were moving on when someone in the regime media asked Tim Scott about it.

    This was his decision point. It was an opportunity to show who he is. And Tim Scott whiffed.

    Taking the wrong side in the social justice war is disqualifying. Scott has gone from being maybe my third favorite candidate in the field and a strong Veepstakes possibility to being behind Doug Bergrum and Vivek Ramaswamy.

  • “Oakland NAACP blasts progressive city leaders demands more action on rising crime.”

    Oakland residents are sick and tired of our intolerable public safety crisis that overwhelmingly impacts minority communities. Murders, shootings, violent armed robberies, home invasions, car break-ins, sideshows, and highway shootouts have become a pervasive fixture of life in Oakland. We call on all elected leaders to unite and declare a state of emergency and bring together massive resources to address our public safety crisis…

    Failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police, our District Attorney’s unwillingness to charge and prosecute people who murder and commit life threatening serious crimes, and the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric have created a heyday for Oakland criminals. If there are no consequences for committing crime in Oakland, crime will continue to soar.

    People are moving out of Oakland in droves. They are afraid to venture out of their homes to go to work, shop, or dine in Oakland and this is destroying economic activity. Businesses, small and large, struggle and close, tax revenues vanish, and we are creating the notorious doom-loop where life in our city continues to spiral downward. As economic pain increases, the conditions that help create crime and criminals are exacerbated by desperate people with no employment opportunities.

    We are in crisis and elected leaders must declare a state of emergency and bring resources together from the city, the county, and the state to end the crisis. We are 500 police officers short of the number that experts say Oakland needs. Our 911 system does not work. Residents now know that help will not come when danger confronts them. Worse, criminals know that too…

    There is nothing compassionate or progressive about allowing criminal behavior to fester and rob Oakland residents of their basic rights to public safety. It is not racist or unkind to want to be safe from crime. No one should live in fear in our city.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Oakland residents can look across the bay to see what happens to cities Social Justice Warriors control. “Every store on Market Street is closed.”
  • San Francisco hardware store lost $700,000 to organized shoplifting. (Hat Tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of blue city retail apocalypses: “Field Office, a Trophy Complex Unable to Find Tenants, Defaults on $73.8 Million Loan. Goldman Sachs and Lincoln Property stopped making payments.”

    The owners of Field Office, a 290,375-square-foot office complex near the Willamette River, have defaulted on their $73.8 million loan after being unable to find enough tenants, becoming the latest office owners to throw in the towel on Portland’s struggling office market.

    Field Office is owned by New York investment bank Goldman Sachs and Lincoln Property Co., a Dallas-based real estate firm with operations in Portland. The pair bought Field Office from local developer Project^ and National Real Estate Advisors, an investment firm based in Washington, D.C., for $118 million in April 2019, according to public records.

    Funny how letting antifa/#BlackLivesMatter rioters and crime run rampant through your downtown destroys property values. #ThisIsYourCityOnSocialJustice

  • Black Florida State University professor who published numerous studies on “systemic racism” is fired for just making shit up. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • You’re a Texas republican congressman who’s also an ER doctor and you try to assist a teenage girl having a medical emergency? That’s a handcuffing.
  • Want speak at our webiner? Professor: Sure. OK, here’s your bill for €80,000.
  • Food giant sued over discriminating against white men.

    A former employee of a large food service corporation is suing the company in federal court after it fired her for refusing to participate in a program that discriminates against white male employees.

    Courtney Rogers worked for Charlotte, North Carolina-based Compass Group USA Inc. from her home office in San Diego, California.

    The company had more than 280,000 employees and $20.1 billion in revenue in 2019, according to its LinkedIn profile.

  • “Back in 2018, NBA megastar LeBron James opened his I Promise School in Akron, Ohio with the noble goal of transforming the lives of at-risk students and parents in his hometown. But it appears that the school has some major challenges five years into its existence. According to a report from the Akron Beacon Journal, the I Promise School’s fall class of eighth graders has has not seen a single student pass the state’s math test in five years – since the group was in the third grade.”
  • “University of North Texas Announces Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Office is “Dissolved.'” Good. But the people who staffed it also need to be laid off.
  • Kickstarter cracks down on AI.
  • “Family Torn Between Placing Grandpa In Hospice And Having Him Run For Senate.”
  • We should all be so happy:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Taibbi: How The Left Lost Its Mind

    Monday, July 31st, 2023

  • “It’s as simple as people thought everything was permitted in pursuit of getting rid of Donald Trump.”
  • Taibbi says he wasn’t pushed out of Rolling Stone, he just thought he could make more money by leaving. And he was right! “Let’s just say that I’m making many times over more than I was making at Rolling Stone.”
  • MT: I don’t believe a lot of the identity politics that are being proffered by the current version of the Democratic Party are genuine. And my first experience with this, where I really, really thought about this, was when I was following Bernie Sanders’s campaign in 2016. And there was a moment in that campaign where he first started to really draw blood against Hillary right. You might remember it was like in February, uh, or late January of 2016. He was hammering her on her ties to Goldman Sachs and other Banks. The New York Post interestingly did this, published this big list of all of her speech commitments and it was kind of amazing. And she wouldn’t release the transcripts right she wouldn’t release the transcripts. I mean, even the schedule was amazing. She was doing three hundred thousand dollars in the morning and then flying to some place and doing 400 Grand or something.

    Reason: Yeah circle of the Bilderbergers, or whatever.

    MT: And they tried everything to hit back, and nothing worked until she said: “If we break up the banks tomorrow, will that end racism?” And Bernie was paralyzed by that.

    Reason: Yeah, Bernie’s an old school, he’s a real old school Commie. I mean, like where it’s class and everything else is a distraction, right? That, you know, capitalists will use race in order to keep the workers from realizing, no, they’re all on the same side well

    MT: I almost wish he was that, because you know Bernie also marched in, you know, in for the civil rights movement in the 60s. And he was terrified of the idea that he might be accused of racism. It mortified him, and I think it really slowed his campaign.

    Reason: There was also that moment, I think it might have been in Seattle or something, where he was almost literally pushed off the stage by a couple of black activists, who were like “We need to be talking about racial concerns,” not whatever he was talking about.

    MT: Right, not your class thing. [And] that was when they started to sort of demonize the white working class, right, which is a brilliant strategic move. Also, interestingly, it was the exact opposite of what the Clintons had done in the 90s. You know the Clinton’s whole strategy was let’s peel off a little bit of that white working class-

    Reason: We feel their pain.

    MT: We feel their pain, right. And that’s, you know, they just got over the finish line doing that. So we can add to the sins of Hillary Clinton that she also injected identity politics.

    With all due respect to Taibbi, identity politics had been injected into the Democratic Party’s DNA long before the 2016 presidential race.

  • “Trump [has] been an enormous Boon to the intelligence Services they’ve been able to say hey if you if you code as somebody who sides with Trump…essentially they’ve created what I like to call the One Villain Theory of the Universe. Which is if you’re on Trump’s side, that means you’re on Putin’s side, which means you’re also on Assad’s side, you’re on Orban’s side, you’re on the side of domestic violence.”
  • MT: “Covid has a whole long list of things that have added to Middle America’s grievances. Beginning with the fact that it it increasingly looks like they lied to us about the origins of the disease for some pretty weak reasons. Maybe they were trying to cover up some research they were doing. That’s thing one that’s looking increasingly likely. At the very least they excluded the possibility of that illegitimately and used

    Reason: “And that’s where the government was telling Twitter and Facebook, like, don’t run this stuff or they’ll squelch it.”

  • “I did a story about Loudoun County, Virginia, when Republicans won the gubernatorial election there. And there were people there who were furious at the way they had been portrayed in the media, as racists or anti-vaxxers. Really, they wanted their kids to go back to school, because they had done their own research online, they found the kids weren’t really at risk, and their kids weren’t learning anything, and it was a burden on them personally, right? So there’s a million things like this.”
  • I don’t agree with all Taibbi’s takes, and a whole lot of things were going wrong with the left long before he deigned to notice it, but over all it’s an interesting interview.

    Mark Zuckerberg Has Been A Very Bad Robot Boy

    Thursday, July 27th, 2023

    Meta, AKA “The Artist Formerly Known As Facebook,” announced that they just lost $21 billion on their Reality Labs division, AKA the Metaverse, AKA the worst virtual reality environment since January 2022.

    Meta’s second-quarter earnings showed that Reality Labs, its virtual and augmented reality development business, has lost a staggering $21.3 billion since January 2022 — and executives warned the bleeding will only get worse.

    The unit recorded $276 million in Q2 sales this year — down from the $339 million it drew in during Q1, underscoring how VR and AR technology has yet to infiltrate the mainstream.

    The losses were wider than analysts expected, though CFO Susan Li suggested in the report that Meta will continue to invest in the tech, which is used to power the metaverse.

    “For Reality Labs, we expect operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and investments to further scale our ecosystem,” Li wrote.

    Just last month, Meta unveiled its Quest 3 headset for $499, which Mark Zuckerberg touted as “the first mainstream headset with high-res color mixed reality,” though it’s unclear how successful the tech has been so far.

    Hint: Not at all.

    Just how do you lose $21 billion? That’s a burn rate of over a billion a month. You could hire a mountain of developers and engineers for that money, maybe 100,000 or so of them even at California salary rates. Wikipedia (usual caveats apply) says Occulus only had 17,00 employees in 2022. Meta only paid $2 billion to acquire Occulas (which became Reality Labs) in the first place. Hell, you could fund over 200 startups at $100 million a pop, and it would still be more likely for any one of them to be profitable than Reality Labs.

    Usually you have to be a politician to lose that much money. I wonder if Reality Labs losses might be covering up losses in other divisions. Or if the money is getting siphoned off to somewhere else entirely…

    Earlier this month, Meta found itself on the defense in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by stand-up comic Sarah Silverman and authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, who alleged that Meta’s artificial intelligence-backed language models were trained on illegally-acquired datasets containing the authors’ work.

    The suit against Meta points to the allegedly illicit sites used to train LLaMA, the ChatGPT competitor the company launched in February.

    Naturally, anything involving large corporations ripping off science fiction writers attracts my attention, and I used to bump into Kadrey back when I was on the SF con circuit. The same firm is also suing on behalf of Paul Trem­blay and Mona Awad.

    There probably needs to be some sort of regulation on how much AI generated content can come from any particular living creator. If I feed an AI all of Paul McCarthy’s songs, and ask it to produce a new one based on those, is it copyright infringement?

    I suspect a number of lawyers are going to be getting a lot of money off AI in the near future…

    LinkSwarm for July 14, 2023

    Friday, July 14th, 2023

    More Biden crime family news, Toast Tab burns diners, and a judge blocks the Biden regime censorship. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Biden DOJ Indicts Whistleblower Prepared To Testify Against Biden Family.”

    Dr. Gal Luft, the “missing witness” from the Biden corruption investigation, told the NY Post last week that he was arrested in Cyprus to stop him from testifying in front of the House Oversight Committee that the Biden family received payments from individuals linked to Chinese military intelligence, and that they had an FBI mole who shared classified information with the Biden benefactors from the China-controlled energy company CEFC.

    “I told the DOJ that Hunter was associated with a very senior retired FBI official who had a distinct physical characteristic—he had one eye,” Luft said.

    That FBI official is widely believed to be former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who gave $100,000 to a trust for two of then-Vice President Joe Biden’s grandchildren in 2016 shortly before telling Hunter, “I would be delighted to do future work with you.”

    Now, Biden’s DOJ has charged Luft with failing to register under the Foreign Agents Act (FARA), as well as Iranian sanctions violations. He’s alleged to have conspired with others to act in China’s interest, including recruiting and paying a former high ranking U.S. government official to support policies beneficial to China.

    Democrats are turning the federal justice apparatus into banana republic keystone cops to hide their own crimes.

  • Speaking of Hunter: “How reckless Hunter Biden photographed himself driving at 172mph while behind the wheel of his Porsche en route to a days-long Vegas bender with prostitutes and pictured himself smoking CRACK while behind the wheel.” No doubt left-wingers will crow about how Hunter is “living his best life.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Federal judge blocks Biden’s censorship schemes. “Terry Doughty, a Louisiana federal judge, issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday blocking certain federal agencies and officials, including the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Services, from communicating with social-media platforms.” Good.
  • The U.S. Navy blocks Iran from hijacking two tankers.
  • Dispatches from The Biden Recession: “‘Something Just Snapped’: Consumers Panic Search ‘Pawn Shop Near Me.'”
  • Poland is sending Ukraine Mi-24 Hind helicopters. The Hind is getting pretty long in the tooth, but it was a tough beast in its day.
  • “I’m willing to make a bold prediction and say that by the end of October, Mr. Biden will withdraw his reelection bid, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom will be declared the Democrats’ most viable option for the presidency.” I think he’s wrong. I think they’ll try to have Newsom replace Biden at the convention.
  • Just another week in Baltimore: “30 People Shot, 2 Dead As Block Party In Baltimore Turns Into ‘War Zone.'”
  • CDC Altered Death Certificates to Remove ‘COVID Vaccine’ as Cause.”
  • Nigel Farage is being systematically unbanked.
  • Meta/Facebook’s new Twitter rip-off Threads is filled with “dark design patterns” created to thwart the user’s wishes. (That tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Black Georgia state rep defects from the Democrats to the Republicans over school choice.

    “When I decided to stand up on behalf of disadvantaged children in support of school choice, my Democrat colleagues didn’t stand by me,” [Georgia State House Rep. Mesha] Mainor explained of her decision in a statement to Fox News Digital. “They crucified me. When I decided to stand up in support of safe communities and refused to support efforts to defund the police, they didn’t back me. They abandoned me.”

    “For far too long, the Democrat Party has gotten away with using and abusing the black community,” she added. “For decades, the Democrat Party has received the support of more than 90% of the black community. And what do we have to show for it? I represent a solidly blue district in the city of Atlanta. This isn’t a political decision for me. It’s a moral one.”

  • Nasdaq rebalances.
  • The New York Times is doing such gangbusters business that they just laid off their entire sports department.
  • Garbage restaurant QR code menu app Toast Tab is now taking money directly out of your pockets for a “processing fee.” They’re a garbage company run by garbage people and I hope they go bankrupt.
  • For a mere $950,000, you own the home of the Butthole Surfers in Driftwood, Texas.
  • Happy Bastille Day! Here’s Jerry Pournelle’s timeless essay on the original event.
  • Hollywood Confused By New Movie That Depicts Child Sex Trafficking As Bad.”
  • Star Turn Doggy:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • LinkSwarm for June 9, 2023

    Friday, June 9th, 2023

    Welcome to the Friday LinkSwarm! This week: Too much Facebook/Instagram/pedophile news, and not enough songs about buildings and food.

    

  • Funny how the indictment against Trump dropped just as evidence surfaced that Biden had taken $5 million in bribes from Bursima. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
    

  • Thanks to “green energy,” there’s a good chance that more energy blackouts are coming this summer.

    Summer’s coming. That means sunshine, swimming, cookouts — and blackouts.

    That’s the warning from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.

    According to NERC, at least two-thirds of the country is at risk for major power outages this summer.

    This extends to most everyone west of the Mississippi except for Texas.

    Texas and much of the Midwest will be fine, the report says, so long as we don’t experience hot, windless summer days.

    Well, that’s a relief. When do we ever get hot, windless summer days in Texas and the Midwest?

    Part of the problem is the steady removal of fossil-fuel plants from the grid.

    These plants are supposed to be replaced by renewables — wind and solar — but wind doesn’t work on windless days, and solar doesn’t keep your air conditioning running on steamy nights.

    The Wall Street Journal reports the Environmental Protection Agency has made things worse with new nitrogen-oxides rules from its recently finalized “Good Neighbor Plan, which requires fossil-fuel power plants in 22 states to reduce NOx emissions. NERC predicts power plants will comply by limiting hours of operation but warns they may need regulatory waivers in the event of a power crunch.”

  • Institute for the Study of War: “Ukrainian forces conducted a limited but still significant attack in western Zaporizhia Oblast on the night of June 7 to 8. Russian forces apparently defended against this attack in a doctrinally sound manner and had reportedly regained their initial positions as of June 8.” Other sources are reporting modest Ukrainian gains.
  • Instagram is evidently home of a giant pedophile network.

    A comprehensive investigation by the Wall Street Journal and the Stanford Internet Observatory reveals that Meta-owned Instagram has been home to an organized and massive network of pedophiles.

    But what separates this case from most is that Instagram’s own algorithms were promoting pedophile content to other pedophiles, while the pedos themselves used coded emojis, such as a picture of a map, or a slice of cheese pizza.

    Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers via recommendation systems that excel at linking those who share niche interests, the Journal and the academic researchers found.

    The pedophilic accounts on Instagram mix brazenness with superficial efforts to veil their activity, researchers found. Certain emojis function as a kind of code, such as an image of a map—shorthand for “minor-attracted person”—or one of “cheese pizza,” which shares its initials with “child pornography,” according to Levine of UMass. Many declare themselves “lovers of the little things in life.” -WSJ

    According to the researchers, Instagram allowed pedophiles to search for content with explicit hashtags such as #pedowhore and #preteensex, which were then used to connect them to accounts that advertise child-sex material for sale from users going under names such as “little slut for you.”

    Sellers of child porn often convey the child’s purported age, saying they are “on chapter 14,” or “age 31,” with an emoji of a reverse arrow.

  • Instagram can’t block pedophiles, but it can block the account of Democratic Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Remember: Opposing the corrupt Biden Cabal is a worse crime than pedophilia for vast swathes of our media elites… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of Meta, they’re threatening to “pull news feeds on its platforms for California residents if the state legislature passes the Journalism Preservation Act.” That act “requires big tech companies to pay news outlets a journalism usage fee.” For once the pedo-coddlers are right: No one should be forced to subsidize failing social justice-infected newsrooms.
  • Speaking of pedophiles: “Itasca ISD Superintendent Michael Stevens arrested, charged with online solicitation of a minor.” Maybe parents wouldn’t worry so much about educators trying to screw their children if educators didn’t keep trying to screw their children.
  • This week in Democrats passing unconstitutional laws that strip citizens of rights: “llinois’s Gov. J. B. “Jumbo Burger” Pritzker signed himself a whale of a state law yesterday that went into effect IMMEDIATELY. And, immediately, restricted Illinois citizens from pursuing constitutional claims against their state government unless they filed the lawsuits in one of two, Democratic approved, state sanctioned, Democratic counties – Cook or Sangamon.” That’s a prima facie violation of the First Amendment “right of the people…to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
  • Free New York City crack pipe vending machine cleaned out overnight. “Free crack pipe vending machine” sounds like the punchline to a Norm MacDonald joke from the 1990s, but it’s now evidently the policy of New York Democrats.
  • North Dakota’s Republican Governor is running for President. Burgum is evidently a billionaire after being an early investor in Great Plains Software, which was sold to Microsoft in 2001. The fact he’s close to Bill Gates doesn’t give me a lot of warm fuzzies, and Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg proved that rich-but-unknown outsiders shoveling money into a Presidential campaign costs you a lot of jack and earn you boatloads of squat. He’s a pretty decent public speaker, but in a blow-dried 80’s executive sense, and he sort of looks like if Richard Belzer had played the Michael Douglas role in Falling Down.
  • By contrast, Chris Sununu realized he had no business running for President. Good.
  • American Airlines has to ground more than 150 regional jets due to a pilot shortage.
  • I know nothing more than this. Evidently local media have ignored it as well:

  • Pitch Meeting for 2023 The Little Mermaid. “Life being better down where it’s wetter is tight!”
  • U.S. women’s soccer team loses 12-0 to fourth tier Welsh soccer club.
  • When life imitates Mythbusters.
  • “Due To High Crime, Mafia Closes Its Chicago Office.” “How are we supposed to conduct respectable business — loan sharking, bribery, racketeering, illegal gambling — with so much crime going on? It’s insane!”
  • LinkSwarm for October 28, 2022

    Friday, October 28th, 2022

    Blue cities bleed, more Democrats violating election laws, another Democratic congressional staffer exposed for carrying water for Red China, Elon Musk takes over and immediately starts cleaning house at Twitter, and more transexual lunacy. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

    
    

  • Confirmation of what we already know: Homicide rates surging in major cities run by Soros-backed DAs.

    As polling continues to show crime is a top issue for voters, the number of homicides has skyrocketed nationwide.

    In fact, homicide rates rose by an average of nearly 10% in 50 of the most populated U.S. cities between the third quarter of last year and the third quarter of this year — and are still rising — according to a new study.

    WalletHub compared 50 of America’s largest cities based on per capita homicides for the third quarter (July through September) of each year since 2020, using locally published crime data to compile its findings.

    According to WalletHub, these were the ten cities with the highest homicide cases per 100,000 residents from July through September:

    1. St. Louis, Mo. (19.69)
    2. Kansas City, Mo. (14.86)
    3. Detroit, Mich. (13.24)
    4. Baltimore, Md. (12.45)
    5. New Orleans, La. (10.99)
    6. Milwaukee, Wisc. (10.46)
    7. Memphis, Tenn. (9.99)
    8. Philadelphia, Pa. (9.36)
    9. Norfolk, Va. (7.78)
    10. Chicago, Ill. (7.71)

    The top prosecutors in most of these cities are backed by progressive megadonor George Soros, a billionaire who’s spent the last several years injecting tens of millions of dollars into local district attorney races nationwide, backing candidates who support policies such as abolishing bail, defunding the police, and decriminalizing or deprioritizing certain offenses.

    In St. Louis, for example, Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner is one of the first prosecutors bankrolled by Soros’ financial network of organizations and affiliates, heavily funded by these sources in 2016 and again in 2020.

    Amid high homicide figures, Gardner has declined more cases and issued fewer arrest warrants than her predecessor, charging fewer felonies and prosecuting thousands of fewer cases as a result. She has also deferred prison sentences for misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies as part of her reform initiatives.

    Gardner has said this is part of her “platform to reduce the number of cases unnecessarily charged in order to focus on the more difficult cases for trial.”

    Last year, Gardner came under fire after three murder cases under her purview were dismissed in one week due to prosecutors in her office not showing up for hearings or being unprepared.

    Her campaign website boasts that she’s “made jail and prison a last resort, reserved for those who pose a true public safety risk,” while limiting “the arrest and detention of people accused of misdemeanors and low-level felonies.”

    Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner is another Soros-funded prosecutor.

    Soros spent almost $1.7 million through the Philadelphia Justice and Public Safety PAC to help Krasner in 2017, pouring more than five times as much money into the race as Krasner himself. Four years later, Krasner received a combined $1.259 million from Soros-funded groups for his reelection.

    During his tenure, Krasner has cut the future years of incarceration by half and slashed the length of parole in probation supervision by nearly two-thirds compared to the previous DA. He has also made a priority of not prosecuting people who are illegally in possession of guns unless they hurt or kill people.

    The top prosecutors in New Orleans, Milwaukee, Norfolk, and Chicago have also been backed by Soros-linked money. Many of the others are self-described progressive prosecutors.

    According to some experts, progressive prosecutors pursuing soft-on-crime policies have contributed to the spike in homicides and other violent crime.

    “Prosecutors in most major cities have failed the people they serve by refusing to prosecute criminals, including those charged with violent crimes,” Tristin Kilgallon, associate professor of pre-law and history at the University of Findlay, told WalletHub. “Countless violent crimes have been committed by those who have been released back into the streets due to recent ‘bail reform’ initiatives or by prosecutors who declined to pursue charges.”

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Speaking of violent crime and Democrats, Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul was violently assaulted in his home.
    

  • “Texas Secretary of State Finds ‘Serious Breaches’ in Harris County 2020 Election Audit. Auditors found multiple chain of custody issues and violations of state and federal law requiring maintenance of records in the state’s largest county.”

    Issues found by auditors relate primarily to the county’s extralegal “drive-thru” voting initiated by then-interim County Clerk Chris Hollins.

    Auditors found that for at least 14 polling locations the county does not show chain of custody for the Mobile Ballot Boxes (MBB) and that there were multiple MBBs created for some voting locations. Auditors say the MBBs from the polling locations “were not the MBBs ultimately tabulated.” They also note that they have been able to locate some missing MBBs, but have not been given an explanation as to why the originals were not tabulated. Each MBB can hold 9,999 ballots.

    Another issue found by auditors is that poll book and provisional voting data provided by the county do not match the number of cast vote records on some of the devices.

    Ennis also noted that after upgrading voting systems the county does not appear to have retained “any equipment or computers that provide relevant reports or alternatively, can read the MBBs” from 2020 or recover the cast vote records stored in them as required by both state and federal election codes.

    Why, it’s almost like the Democrats running Harris County wanted to commit election fraud…

  • Speaking of election fraud, Facebook has been fined $25 million for breaking Washington State election law.

    According to court documents, King County Superior Court Judge Douglass North found Meta to be in violation of Washington’s political disclosure law 822 separate times between 2019 and 2021 and issued the maximum possible fine for each instance, which totaled up to $30,000 per violation.

    Meta was also ordered to “come into full compliance” with the state’s election transparency laws within the next 30 days as well as pay the attorney’s fees for the case, which Ferguson has requested be tripled for a total of $10.5 million. The final total will be decided by North at a later date.

    According to The Seattle Times, the state’s election transparency laws, which have been in place since 1972, require ad sellers to “disclose the names and addresses of political buys, the targets of such ads and, the total number of viewers of each ad.” The judge found that Meta had intentionally violated the standards.

    Washington Democrat Attorney General Bob Ferguson said “that he had “one word for Facebook’s conduct in this case – arrogance.”

    He told the Times, “It intentionally disregarded Washington’s election transparency laws,” Ferguson said. “But that wasn’t enough. Facebook argued in court that those laws should be declared unconstitutional. That’s breathtaking.”

  • The Oz-Fetterman debate was a disaster for Fetterman.

    When Pennsylvania Democrats insist that a candidate who suffered a life-threatening stroke in May is recovering well and “has no work restrictions and can work full duty in public office,” that candidate must look and sound fine to prove they’re telling the truth. Last night, in the lone debate in the Pennsylvania Senate race, John Fetterman looked and sounded very, very far from fine. But you can judge for yourself by watching the whole debate here.

    I expected Fetterman’s debate performance to be a Rorschach test, with Democrats insisting that he was fine and hand-waving away any problems, and Republicans pointing to every verbal misstep, pause, or oddly worded answer. But by the end of the hour, there was little debate, no pun intended. John Fetterman’s ability to hear, understand, process information, and speak appears to still be severely impacted by his stroke. Perhaps the worst moment of the night came when one of the moderators asked him about a statement he made in 2018 opposing fracking, and how he could square that past stance with his current claim that he always supported fracking. After a long pause, presumably from reading the moderator’s question from the monitor, Fetterman said, “I, I, I do support fracking and . . .” and then for a moment, Fetterman’s head shook, and his mouth moved, but no words came out. Then he picked up again: “I don’t . . . I don’t. I support fracking, and I stand, and I do support fracking.” With everyone watching likely mortified and embarrassed to watch Fetterman struggle to finish the sentence, the moderator mercifully moved on to the next question.

  • Judge for yourself:

  • Biden signs on to the transexual groomer agenda for kids.
  • New Zealand adopts the Netherlands agenda for destroying their own agricultural base.
  • Speaking of green delusions: “Cancel-Out Two Decades Of Emissions Reductions.”
  • “Less Than 1 In 100 Million Chance That COVID-19 Has Natural Origin.”
  • Elon Musk takes over Twitter and immediately starts cleaning house.

    Elon Musk took over Twitter late Thursday and fired company CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, senior legal representative Vijaya Gadde, and general counsel Sean Edgett.

    Musk, the world’s richest man, acquired the social media giant through a $44 billion purchase. He reportedly had until Friday to complete the deal.

    In a video tweet that went viral, Musk appeared at Twitter’s corporate offices Wednesday carrying a sink, implying that employees would need to accept that he was now in charge.

    This is a good start, but all the people on the Safety and Trust Council need to be fired, and all accounts suspended or banned need to be restored.

  • Rishi Sunak is the new UK Prime Minister, and Nigel Farage is not impressed:

    (Hat tip: The Conservative Treehouse.)

  • Complain about how your children are being taught to a school board? Watch them try to get you fired.
  • The Russian economy will ‘die by winter’ because of Putin’s war on Ukraine, according to Russian economist Vladislav Inozemtsev.
  • Another week, another Democratic congressional aide with ties to China discovered.

    A House Democratic staffer was fired after her outreach to other congressional aides allegedly on behalf of the Chinese embassy was revealed this week, National Review has learned. After an investigation found that the staffer had acted improperly, her boss, Representative Don Beyer, swiftly removed her.

    “Congressman Beyer was totally unaware of these activities prior to being contacted by the House Sergeant At Arms,” Aaron Fritschner, his deputy chief of staff, told National Review in a statement this morning. “As soon as he learned of them, he followed every directive he was given by security officials. The staffer in question is no longer employed by the office of Congressman Beyer.”

    Fritschner added that Beyer, who has a hawkish record on China, was “deeply upset” upon learning about the activities of the now-former staffer, Barbara Hamlett.

    The LinkedIn page for Barbara Jenell Hamlett shows she worked in the U.S. House from 1978 to 2008, and that she also worked as a volunteer for Terry McAuliffe.

  • Did White House staffer Ron Klain violate the Hatch Act? (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Hmmm: “San Diego ER seeing up to 37 marijuana cases a day — mostly psychosis.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • “Ohio Supreme Court Suspends Democrat Judge.”

    Cleveland Municipal Court Judge Pinkey Carr, a Democrat, was found to exhibit such misconduct that comprise more than 100 incidents over a period of about two years.

    The misconduct “encompassed repeated acts of dishonesty; the blatant and systematic disregard of due process, the law, court orders, and local rules; the disrespectful treatment of court staff and litigants; and the abuse of capias warrants and the court’s contempt power,” stated the court’s per curium opinion. “That misconduct warrants an indefinite suspension from the practice of law.”

  • The new “Pride” flag, or a really high level of Tempest?
  • Bahaus Costume Party.
  • The Bosnian Ape Society is back with the Mikoyan and Gurevich Design Bureau tackling the Cup Noodle.