The DOJ comes for Google

It’s about time. The heavy-breathers who have to keep actively reminding themselves not to do evil have had it coming for years. Let’s hope that the DOJ isn’t content with a Microsoft-style slap on the wrist and drops the full AT&T breakup on them:

The Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit Tuesday alleging that Google engaged in anticompetitive conduct to preserve monopolies in search and search advertising that form the cornerstones of its vast conglomerate.

The long-anticipated case, filed in a Washington, D.C., federal court, marks the most aggressive U.S. legal challenge to a company’s dominance in the tech sector in more than two decades, with the potential to shake up Silicon Valley and beyond.

At this point, I think it’s safe to say that the days of the platform/publisher dance are numbered. And it’s going to be hilarious to see Google’s horndog lawyers trying to make the very sort of free speech arguments that their Trust & Safety teams consistently ignore.

Mr. Toobin is very excited about your ideas

Really? How excited is he?

Funny you should ask….

The New Yorker has suspended reporter Jeffrey Toobin. Sources tell VICE it’s because he exposed himself during a Zoom call last week between members of the New Yorker and WNYC radio.

Toobin said in a statement to Motherboard: “I made an embarrassingly stupid mistake, believing I was off-camera. I apologize to my wife, family, friends and co-workers.”

“I believed I was not visible on Zoom. I thought no one on the Zoom call could see me. I thought I had muted the Zoom video,” he added.

UPDATE: In a stunning ‘correction’ from Vice, which ratchets this story up to ’11’ on the Spinal Tap amplifier of WTF-ness, “This piece has been updated with more detail about the call and the headline has been updated to reflect that Toobin was masturbating.”

Remember, these are the people who believe they are our moral and cultural superiors. Notice that CNN has only “suspended” the freakshow, when they should have fired him immediately.

The secret U.S. Gestapo

 Ron Unz exposes the reality of the would-be U.S. secret police, the ADL:

The choice of the ADL as the primary ideological overseer of America’s Internet may seem natural and appropriate to politically-ignorant Americans, a category that unfortunately includes the technology executives leading the companies involved. But this reflects the remarkable cowardice and dishonesty of the American media from which all these individuals derive their knowledge of our world. The true recent history of the ADL is a remarkably sordid and disreputable tale.

In January 1993, the San Francisco Police Department reported that it had recently raided the Northern California headquarters of the ADL based upon information provided by the FBI. The SFPD discovered that the organization had been keeping intelligence files on more than 600 civic organizations and 10,000 individuals, overwhelmingly of a liberal orientation, with the SFPD inspector estimating that 75{5c1a0fb425e4d1363f644252322efd648e1c42835b2836cd8f67071ddd0ad0e3} of the material had been illegally obtained, much of it by secret payments to police officials. This was merely the tip of the iceberg in what clearly amounted to the largest domestic spying operation by any private organization in American history, and according to some sources, ADL agents across the country had targeted over 1,000 political, religious, labor, and civil rights organizations, with the New York headquarters of the ADL maintaining active dossiers on more than a million Americans.

Not long afterward, an ACLU official who had previously held a high-ranking position with the ADL revealed in an interview that his organization had been the actual source of the highly controversial 1960s surveillance on Martin Luther King, Jr., which it had then provided to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. For many years Hoover had been furiously denounced in the national media headlines for his use of tapes and other secret information on King’s activities, but when a local San Francisco newspaper revealed that an ADL spying operation had actually been the source of all that sordid material, the bombshell revelation was totally ignored in the national media and only reported by fringe organizations, so that today almost no Americans are aware of that fact.

I am not aware of any other private organization in American history that has been involved in even a sliver of such illegal domestic espionage activity, which appears to have been directed against almost all groups and prominent individuals—Left, Right, and Center—suspected of being insufficiently aligned with Jewish and Israeli interests. Some of the illegal material found in ADL possession even raised dark suspicions that it had played a role in domestic terrorist attacks and political assassinations directed against foreign leaders….

In effect, the ADL seems to have long operated as our country’s privatized secret political police, monitoring and enforcing its ideological doctrines on behalf of Jewish groups much as the Stasi did for the Communist rulers of East Germany. Given such a long history of criminal activity, allowing the ADL to extend its oversight to our largest Social Media platforms amounts to appointing the Mafia to supervise the FBI and the NSA, or taking a very large step towards implementing George Orwell’s ” Ministry of Truth” on behalf of Jewish interests.

The ADL are confirmed Pharasatanist scum, whose founding purpose was to defend pedophilia, rape, and murder. They as allergic to the good, the beautiful, and the true as the average vampire is to garlic, silver, and the Cross. Anyone who is attacked by the pedophistic extremists should be regarded as someone who is at least capable of speaking truth, unlike the Always Depraved League. 

And they are not to be feared, they are to be despised. Not for their ethnicity, but for their evil history and for their evil and illegal actions.

Wikipedia debunks Hunter Biden emails

 Of course, by “debunks”, they mean “attempts to memory-hole” the facts:

Allegations of corruption against ex-Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter have apparently been “debunked” and are merely a “conspiracy theory” according to Wikipedia, where editors are battling over the terms.

Hunter Biden was the subject of an explosive report last week as the New York Post published emails alleging that he involved his father in dodgy business dealings in Ukraine and China.

While the story is still unfolding, the Wikipedia page for Hunter Biden simply states that “he and his father have been the subjects of debunked right-wing conspiracy theories pushed by [President] Donald Trump and his allies.” The curious framing was highlighted by conservative commentator Ian Miles Cheong on Twitter on Tuesday.

Eight sources are listed for this one sentence, intending to support the view that any accusations of corruption against the Democratic presidential candidate and his son have already been proven false.

At this point, if you’re still using Wikipedia instead of Infogalactic, you’re part of the problem. Wikipedia isn’t just occasionally unreliable, it is a systematically false pillar of the media’s propaganda machine.

Fox News covers for Biden

 It’s informative to see when the media is suddenly all concerned with the possibility of a source being “sketchy”.  

Fox News was first approached by Rudy Giuliani to report on a tranche of files alleged to have come from Hunter Biden’s unclaimed laptop left at a Delaware computer repair shop, but that the news division chose not to run the story unless or until the sourcing and veracity of the emails could be properly vetted.

With the general election just three weeks away, Giuliani ultimately brought the story to the New York Post, which shares the same owner, Rupert Murdoch. The tabloid has been exhaustively covering the contents of the laptop — which include everything from emails regarding Hunter Biden’s work for a Ukrainian company to personal photos of the recovering addict — with each morsel being amplified in the conservative media world, including on Fox News’ top-rated opinion programs. Thus far, the Fox’s News division has only been able to verify one email from the tranche leaked.

The former New York City mayor and personal attorney to President Donald Trump has long had a working relationship with Fox News, the cable news network whose opinion shows have an overwhelmingly pro-Trump point of view.

But according to two sources familiar with the matter, the lack of authentication of Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop, combined with established concerns about Giuliani as a reliable source and his desire for unvetted publication, led the network’s news division to pass. Fox News declined to comment on this story.

Some of Fox News’ top news anchors and reporters have distanced themselves from the story. During an on-air report that largely focused on how social media platforms handled this story, Bret Baier said, “Let’s say, just not sugarcoat it. The whole thing is sketchy.”

“You couldn’t write this script in 19 days from an election, but we are digging into where this computer is and the emails and the authenticity of it,” he added.

It appears Fox News has adopted the Wikipedia model of only trusting “reliable sources” where “reliable” means “someone who provides information we want to believe”. And what they want to believe is information favorable to the Democratic Party.

The pictures are obviously of Hunter Biden. Apparently they go back to his childhood. Who else could the laptop possibly belong to, his dead mother?

Mostly innocuous

The New York Post corroborates Steve Bannon’s statement that there were 25,000 images on one of the Hunter Biden laptops.

Neither Hunter Biden’s lawyer nor Joe Biden’s campaign have disputed the validity of the trove of data that The Post obtained after being extracted from a MacBook Pro laptop. The owner of a Delaware computer repair shop said the device was dropped off in April 2019 but never retrieved.

A computer camera roll of nearly 25,000 images is loaded with sexually explicit selfies and porn (which The Post is not publishing), but also has snapshots from Biden’s childhood and vacations.

And while some of the more than 11,550 emails involve Biden’s former job on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma and his dealings with the now-bankrupt CEFC China Energy Co., most of his messages are innocuous and personal in nature.

So that part of the scandal is real. We’re still waiting to learn if the darker aspects will be documented. 

Whatever could it be?

Speaking of sportswriters, Peter King is confused as to why people are watching less sports at a time when they’re spending more time at home with less to do.

I think this poll, from the Marist (N.Y.) Center for Sports Communications/Marist Poll, really surprised me: Of 1,560 random Americans at the end of September, 46 percent say they are watching fewer live sports events on TV. That goes against anything we’d normally think. In a pandemic, when people are forced indoors and forced in many instances to be isolated, wouldn’t you figure people would be watching more sports, not less? There wasn’t one dominant reason for the decline, said Jane McManus, longtime sportswriter and director of the Marist Center for Sports Communication—though 35 percent of those polled said concern about gathering with friends to watch sports was a prime reason; “athletes speaking out on political issue” was 32 percent, with the interest in the flood of news/election coverage making respondents 20 percent less likely to watch live sports. “We live in complicated times,” McManus told me. “Viewership traditions have been upended. Say you might have a tradition of watching the football game with your elderly father. Maybe now you’re staying away from your elderly father because you’re being careful about COVID-19.”

I think the one other striking point of comparison was the decline of those who consider themselves fans of football. A 2017 Marist poll found that 67 percent of respondents were football fans. The 2020 poll found that only 52 percent were. (Baseball was down, from 51 to 37 percent; basketball down from 44 to 37 percent—odd considering the poll was taken this time in the midst of exciting playoffs.) McManus said: “I don’t think you can isolate on any one thing right now, except that it seems people just have less bandwidth to deal with sports. For instance, I don’t think 67 to 52 for football is forever. Maybe you lost your job, you’re dealing with unemployment, your life is totally different than it was. I just think people’s focus is fractured, and the erosion is happening for every reason.”

The stubborn obtuseness of the social justice media is downright amusing at times. Readers have been telling Peter King for years to keep the politics out of his columns, and he has resolutely told them to take a hike if they don’t like his regular, though admittedly minimalistic, tangents about Trump, the coronavirus, gay rights, and BLM, to name a few. And to be fair, the size of his audience has not been reduced by these occasional little excursions, which may be why King finds it hard to believe that people are actually turning off the NFL due to all the anti-American political propaganda and BLM histrionics.

The key difference here is that King, although he’s never seen a left-wing cause he doesn’t instinctively support, has pretty much kept the political nonsense to a minimum. His columns are not only very much devoted to football and full of inside football detail, they are also extraordinarily long. He usually confines his political meanderings to one, or sometimes two, points in his 10 Things I Think I Think section, which is usually less than a tenth of his weekly column, and is located at the bottom. For example, in this week’s column, the overtly political content is largely limited to this:

o. Fifteen days till election day. From the sounds and looks of things, voting early is the best plan. It’s my plan.

And you know, if a veteran sportswriter wants to devote 21 words out of nearly 12,000 to his personal politics, he’s earned the right to indulge himself. Even if he was promulgating rank heresy about the God-Emperor, that little aside is nothing that can’t be easily skipped. But what King does, however irritating one finds it to be, is both qualitatively and quantitatively different than what the professional sports leagues are presently inflicting on their long-suffering and increasingly-distant fans. The non-stop political propaganda, the relentless insults to the flag and the anthem, and the ignorant chatter of the commentators completely ruins the experience for the average spectator.

Which, of course, is why, like more than a few other lifelong NFL fans, I haven’t watched a single minute of an NFL game or NFL coverage this year. Then again, from what I’ve read, this appears to be an excellent year for Vikings fans to assiduously avoid watching them play.

It’s not about the money

 It’s mostly about the influence. The success of Tucker Carlson, and the complete refusal of the media to even try to imitate his success, makes it very clear that their motives are not profit-driven:

Tucker Carlson’s prime-time Fox News show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, has shattered record after record to become the highest rated cable news program in television history. On any given night, Carlson’s must-watch program draws nearly 5 million Americans to the television set — a truly astonishing number we may never see again.

According to an analysis by iSpot.tv, Tucker Carlson accounts for 16 percent all ad revenue at Fox News. And during the six-month period of February through July of this year alone, Tucker generated $37.2 million for Fox News and smashed the competition.

The historic popularity and profitability of Tucker’s show raises a simple, yet important question: why have none of the major networks, including Fox, attempted to copy his success? Wouldn’t the fabled “marketplace of ideas” dictate a certain convergence toward the topics and styles that draw the biggest audiences?

Perhaps the ad boycotts aimed at Tucker have scared off would-be copycats. But this simply raises the question of why companies would leave money on the table by refusing to advertise on television’s most popular cable news show. Something is off here, and it suggests that the media industry does not work according to a simple profit motive….

Readers might recall that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post for $250 million. The paper is of course notoriously biased against Trump, even by the standards of today’s mainstream media. This may be good for business and it may not be — but ultimately this is not what matters. What matters is that the Post is directly or indirectly profitable to its owner, Jeff Bezos. If it lost money, but influenced the public or other important constituencies in a manner that resulted in greater success for Amazon (a company 10,000 times its size), it would still be a worthwhile investment for Bezos.

We can generalize this principle by noting that the parent-subsidiary model is very common in business. Any given subsidiary does not have to be profitable in its own right so long as it benefits the parent company. In the case of The Washington Post, there is a clear “parent company” in the person of Jeff Bezos. But even absent the existence of a formal parent company, one can think of the American power structure itself as the true “parent company” of any sufficiently large and powerful media conglomerate.

Although in some cases this is a metaphor, it captures a very important feature of how the media and our country function. For a media empire operating at the highest levels, the influence it wields on the public’s mind is far more valuable to the ruling power structure than any self-contained profit that could be generated by optimizing their news product to suit the taste of the audience.

One need only look at the fact that despite having a blog with 200 million pageviews, and two of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns of all-time for their respective categories, not a single major publisher or media outlet has expressed any interest in working with me in the last 10 years. Whatever it may be that drives those companies, it obviously isn’t a capitalist profit motive. 

RIP Sid

The dean of Minnesota sports, legendary sportswriter Sid Hartman, has died at the age of 100:

Sid Hartman was, for all of his 100-plus years, a hometown guy. Born on the North Side of Minneapolis on March 15, 1920, he worked for newspapers in his hometown for nearly his entire life, until his death on Sunday afternoon.

From a humble start selling newspapers on the street in 1928, he wrote about sports for the Star Tribune for the ensuing decades. He was still writing three columns a week, his final one appearing on the day he died…. He gained a stature very few journalists have achieved, becoming one of this state’s legendary public figures. For years, he was also a power broker in the local sports scene, playing an integral role in the early success of the Minneapolis Lakers pro basketball team while serving as the team’s de facto general manager and working behind the scenes to help bring major league baseball to Minnesota.

He created a rags-to-riches story unlike any his hometown has seen, working his way from the very bottom of the newspaper industry to one of the most influential and popular figures ever to use a typewriter, and later computer, for his livelihood. He also became a popular radio personality for WCCO and for 20 years was a panelist on a Sunday night TV show. If Minnesotans referred to “Sid,” there was no doubt who they were talking about, much the same as the first-name status of the greatest of those he covered, men like “Kirby” and “Harmon” and “Bud.”

According to a count by Star Tribune staffer Joel Rippel, Hartman produced 21,235 bylined stories in his career, from 1944 until the one that ran on C2 of Sunday’s Sports section. That column was his 119th of 2020.

I never met Sid Hartman. But I read him on a regular basis for the last 45 years and listened to him on ‘CCO for nearly two decades. He was the model for success through consistency and hard work, and his career will always serve as an inspiration to those of us who are aging writers. I’m just sorry that he never got to see the Vikings win the Super Bowl.

200 Million Views

 

I’m pleased to report that today, 17 years and 10 days after the initial post, the Vox Popoli blog has exceeded 200,000,000 pageviews. The blog now consists of 22,968 posts and 1,181,070 comments, although the number of comments does not include those left during the years when the two previous comment systems were utilized. In the interest of clarity, note that these numbers do not include the 26 million views at Alpha Game or the 150k views at DevGame.

A few observations about this traffic milestone. First, it underlines the importance of consistency. If you’re not going to post at least 3-4 times per day, you’re much better off contributing regularly to a group site. Very, very few one-man blogs have survived the demise of what used to be known as the Blogosphere. Second, with an average of 169 views per comment, it proves that the commentariat is not even close to synonymous with the overall readership. Third, it demonstrates that the media narratives about who and what are “popular”, and who and what are not, are largely false. 

Fourth, and most importantly, it emphasizes what I’ve said about the ticket. If you refuse to take the ticket when it is offered, not only will no amount of success or talent open any important doors for you, but the media will remain resolutely silent about anything and everything you achieve unless it provides them with an excuse to try to take you down.

I would, of course, be remiss if I did not express my deep personal appreciation to all the investigative reporters, intelligence agencies, science fiction social justice warriors, and self-appointed thought police for their assistance in making this possible. It literally could not have been done without you.