Well, with three games each left against California & Oakland, and after dropping all five games this week (three against Boston and two against Oakland), it doesn’t look like the Senators are going to avoid 100 losses this season. Better luck in ’71, I hope. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.
Everybody has problems, but we have more than most teams.
Join @PatriachTree, Dianna Deeley, and me at 7pm ET for The Other Podcasthttps://t.co/xY8nnxumcw Likely topics include Gender, Stupid Deals, and Crazy People Are Dangerous™ https://t.co/SEMoFc8wid
Vijaya Gadde became a multimillionaire working for Twitter, and apparently part of her job — why she got paid the big bucks — was to conceal the facts about how Twitter employees were manipulating their platform to suppress facts and opinions that Twitter employees didn’t like. Evita Duffy recounts at Twitter:
Remember all the times Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and top Twitter lawyer Vijaya Gadde assured us that Twitter neither shadowbans nor targets conservatives? Well, they lied.
In the second installment of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files,” independent journalist Bari Weiss exposed how the Big Tech company was secretly “blacklisting” conservative tweets and users by keeping “disfavored” tweets from trending and secretly hiding whole accounts or topics without users’ knowledge. . . .
On July 25, 2018, Vice News reported that several prominent Republican politicians, such as Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, and Matt Gaetz, did not show up in a drop-down menu of automatically suggested searches, even when typing in the politicians’ names.
A day after the outcry over the apparent shadowbanning, Gadde and Twitter’s product head Kayvon Beykpour attempted to couch concerns by co-authoring a blog post titled “Setting the record straight on shadow banning.” “We do not shadow ban,” Gadde and Beykpour insisted. “You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile). And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”
The day before publishing that blog post, Beykpour posted a Twitter thread blaming the discrimination against Republican members of Congress on the company’s use of “behavioral signals and machine learning,” which they were working to “improve.” However, Beykpour assured users that “our behavioral ranking doesn’t make judgments based on political views or the substance of tweets.”
Dorsey then shared Gadde and Beykpour’s blog post, writing, “We don’t shadow ban, and we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints.”
“We want a vibrant and healthy public conversation inclusive of all perspectives, and one that’s immediately relevant and valuable,” added Dorsey.
As Bari Weiss’s thread makes clear, these denials were the direct opposite of truth. It wasn’t some “machine learning” algorithm that was controlling content on Twitter. Internal documents show that top Twitter executives discussed specific decisions on “visibility limitation” tools. They played favorites, boosting some accounts and suppressing others.
The revelations keep coming, and on Friday, Matt Taibbi began telling the story of the lead-up to Twitter’s fateful decision to ban Donald Trump from the platform. Why? Because of “election misinformation”? But as Taibbi clearly demonstrates, Twitter bosses were picking and choosing what (and who) to suppress on that subject:
36. “VERY WELL DONE ON SPEED” Trump was being “visibility filtered” as late as a week before the election. Here, senior execs didn’t appear to have a particular violation, but still worked fast to make sure a fairly anodyne Trump tweet couldn’t be “replied to, shared, or liked”: pic.twitter.com/E0bkjISGBj
40. Twitter teams went easy on Hice, only applying “soft intervention,” with Roth worrying about a “wah wah censorship” optics backlash: pic.twitter.com/PGuihwNSu6
42. “THAT’S UNDERSTANDABLE”: Even the hashtag #StealOurVotes – referencing a theory that a combo of Amy Coney Barrett and Trump will steal the election – is approved by Twitter brass, because it’s “understandable” and a “reference to… a US Supreme Court decision.” pic.twitter.com/6BjJhjypD2
Did I mention that Twitter executives were at times acting on orders from the FBI in deciding whose election-related content got flagged? Because that seems kind of important, doesn’t it?
To summarize the situation as succinctly as possible, everything that they labeled a “conspiracy theory” turns out to be 100% true, and all their denials and explanations turn out to be 100% false.
At some point, we’re going to need an in-depth inquiry to answer a couple of questions: First, how is it that Silicon Valley, once a stronghold of freedom-loving libertarianism, turned into a hive of “woke” SJW Thought Police? And second, when did the FBI become an apparatus of the Democratic Party? Things have gone badly wrong in the past few years, and there must be some coherent explanation for these developments.
There’s a word for this, and that word is shakedown. It is a near-certainty that neither of these lawsuits will ever see the inside of a courtroom; instead, the city will negotiate a settlement with the plaintiffs, perhaps somewhere in the range of $2 million to $5 million per victim, and Feiger will collect his 50% commission, adding millions more to his multimillionaire status. Being a legal pest is quite a lucrative racket, but while a lawyer can grow rich from the proceeds of suing police departments — a direct transfer of wealth from taxpayers — the question needs to be asked whether this kind of “justice” actually does anything to improve law enforcement or the treatment of the mentally ill.
Before we discuss these shootings, or the policy implications involved, let’s first note that Detroit is in Wayne County, named for Revolution War hero and frontier fighter Gen. “Mad Anthony” Wayne (who, of course, is nowadays denounced by liberals as a racist). With a population of around 1.8 million, Wayne County is the largest county in Michigan and “the 19th-most populous county in the United States.” However, Wayne County has been losing population for the last half-century, and at the 2020 census had nearly 900,000 fewer residents than it did in 1970, a decline of 32.7% in 50 years. The population of Wayne County is 48% white and 37% black. Of the county’s 669,277 black residents at the 2020 census, the majority of them (493,212) lived in Detroit, a city whose population is 82% black. So it makes very little sense to claim that the police in Detroit are racist, and if these lawsuits result in a settlement, that money will be subtracted from the budget of a majority-black city. Maybe the black taxpayers in Detroit should ask themselves what “justice” there is in making Geoffrey Fieger richer. But I digress . . .
Did I mention that Wayne County is a Democratic Party stronghold? In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden won Michigan by a margin of less than 3%, with 2,804,040 votes (50.6%) to President Trump’s 2,649,852 (47.8%). In Wayne County, Biden got 597,170 votes (68% of the county total) to Trump’s 264,553 votes (30%). You see that Biden’s margin in Wayne County (332,617) was more twice the size of his statewide margin (154,188) — i.e., Biden won Detroit, and Trump won the rest of the state. Detroit is the urban Democratic tail that wags the statewide Republican dog. Keep this in mind, as we consider the state of affairs in Detroit, where cops are shooting crazy people.
Porter Burks “was believed to have been experiencing a schizophrenic episode Oct. 2 while wandering his neighborhood on the city’s west side with a 3.5-inch knife. Concerned for Burks’ safety, his older brother had called police asking for help and for Burks to be admitted to a hospital.” Five Detroit police officers fired 38 rounds, 19 of which hit Burks. No charges will be filed against the cops involved:
[Wayne County Prosecutor Kym] Worthy sided with police . . . echoing Detroit Police Chief James White’s claim that responding officers had minimal time to “eliminate the threat.”
“The police spent a significant amount of time trying to get him to drop his weapon,” Worthy wrote in a statement. “He suddenly ran at them with the knife and covered the distance between them in approximately three seconds. Eyewitnesses to the shooting were interviewed and indicated that the police did all that they could to de-escalate the situation before Mr. Burks charged at the police.”
Prosecutor Kym Worthy (let); Police Chief James White (right)
I’m just going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Kym Worthy and James White are not racists who want to kill innocent black people.
The lawsuit alleges officers failed to execute the de-escalation tactics Detroit police are trained in — at least one officer was a member of Detroit Police’s Crisis Intervention Team.
Instead, three officers shot four rounds at Miller, and officers allegedly surrounded the home with assault rifles, according to the lawsuit. Miller’s family previously held a vigil for their loved one, demanding justice.
“It was obvious that the easily agitated 27-year-old Ms. Miller, who was dressed only in her underwear, was in the midst of a mental health crisis,” Fieger wrote in the lawsuit.
The officers ”were in no immediate danger while brutally taking down, assaulting, and fatally shooting four times the underwear-clad, mentally ill, and unarmed Ms. Miller who just assured the officers she did not, and was not going to, harm anyone,” Fieger continued. . . . Miller’s mother, Lakisha Washington-Meeks, called police on Nov. 10 asking for help for her daughter, who she said was experiencing a mental crisis and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Washington-Meeks told police that Miller had hit her young child and was armed with knives, a bat and a gun. . . .
Detroit Police Chief James White said he had concerns regarding the killing and previously announced recommending the unpaid suspensions of three officers, including supervisor Sgt. Marvin Anthony. Another unidentified supervisor was taken off the streets and assigned desk work.
The Detroit Board of Police Commissioners denied White’s recommendation to have Anthony’s suspension be without pay.
No officers have been charged in Miller’s death.
We haven’t yet heard from the prosecutor’s office, but in the meantime, permit me to suggest that if you call 911 to report that your schizophrenic daughter is behaving violently and is “armed with knives, a bat and a gun,” and if she’s running around in her underwear ranting like a lunatic when the cops show up . . . Well, Crazy People Are Dangerous.
One need not be biased against lesbians or marijuana users — “Why, some of my best friends . . .” — to see what’s wrong with this deal. Nor is it necessary, in criticizing the Biden administration’s fecklessness, to forget that Vladimir Putin is a bad guy, and that the prosecution and imprisonment of Brittney Griner was essentially about hostage-taking.
Even if you are deeply sympathetic to cannabis consumers and lesbians, and deeply hostile to Putin’s regime, still one must recognize this: In negotiating with authoritarians, a democracy is always at a disadvantage, because the antagonist is essentially immune to public opinion.
Sure, Putin is a tyrant and, sure, nine years in prison is a conspicuously harsh sentence for cannabis possession, but there are other Americans serving prison sentences in foreign countries for crimes that might have gotten them only probation in U.S. cities with slap-on-the-wrist prosecutors like George Gascón and Larry Krasner.
Russia’s prosecution of Griner was obviously part of a propaganda strategy, at a time when Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has made him an international pariah, and the bottom line is, it worked.
Because Brittney Griner “checked all the boxes” — gay, female, minority — and is something of a celebrity in the world of sports (never mind that almost nobody watches women’s basketball) the Russians knew very well that her prosecution would make her a valuable symbol and thereby expose Biden to enormous interest-group pressure.
On 2 November 2011, Bout was convicted by a jury in a Manhattan federal court of conspiracy to kill U.S. citizens and officials, delivery of anti-aircraft missiles, and providing aid to a terrorist organization, and was sentenced to the minimum 25 years’ imprisonment because the crime was due to [a U.S.] operation. . . .
On 18 November 2010, shortly after Bout’s extradition to the United States, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s aide Sergei Prikhodko said that Russia had “nothing to hide” in Bout’s criminal case stating, “it is in our interest that the investigation … be brought to completion, and [Bout] should answer all the questions the American justice system has.
On 18 January 2013, Russian government officials announced that “judges, investigators, justice ministry officials and special services agents who were involved in Russian citizens Viktor Bout’s and Konstantin Yaroshenko’s legal prosecution and sentencing to long terms of imprisonment” would be added to a list of U.S. officials who will be denied Russian entry visas in response to the U.S. Magnitsky Act, under which certain Russian officials are ineligible to enter the U.S.
It is thought that Bout was of help to Russia’s intelligence agencies, and he is alleged to have connections to ranking Russian officials, including former deputy prime minister Igor Sechin.
So, Bout wasn’t just an arms dealer, he was a GRU “asset,” and in order to spring him from U.S. prison, the Russians needed something to offer in exchange — this was a motive for hostage-taking, which may explain why, in 2018, tourist Paul Whelan found himself arrested, charged with being a spy in what was obviously a set-up arranged by the FBS (successor agency to the KGB) and sentenced to 16 years. The blunt-force crudeness of the “spying” case against Whelan might have been justified in Russian minds by the fact that Viktor Bout’s arrest was the result of a U.S. “sting” operation: “You set up our guy, we set up your guy.” Except, of course, there is zero reason to believe Whelan was “our guy” at all, whereas Bout’s connections to the GRU were plainly apparent.
As a pawn to exchange for Viktor Bout, Paul Whelan may have been useful with Donald Trump in the White House, but when the Biden administration took over, the Russians seem to have calculated that a Democrat wouldn’t trade a terrorist arms dealer for a mere middle-aged white guy, and thus the arrest of Brittney Griner.
The Biden administration bought it, hook, line and sinker.
“[Brittney Griner] represents the best America — the best about America — just across the board, everything about her.”
— Joe Biden
She is a symbol, you see? And because Democrats are controlled by this kind of symbolism, they played right into Putin’s hands, trading the family cow for some magic beans, as it were.
