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“…VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis wants concrete action to combat the “emergency” of plastics littering seas and oceans.
Francis made the appeal in a message Saturday to galvanize Christians and others to work to save what he hails as the “marvelous,” God-given gift of the “great waters and all they contain.”
He said efforts to fight plastics litter must be waged “as if everything depended on us.”
The pope also denounced as “unacceptable” the privatization of water resources at the expense of the “human right to have access to this good.”
Environmental protection is a priority of his papacy…”
“…Remember the good old days of politics? You know, when politicians used to promise a chicken in every pot? In California, which has the nation’s highest poverty when factoring in cost-of-living, human feces lining the streets of its second largest city, the second-highest cost of living and the tenth highest tax burden in the country, they don’t worry about chicken. Their priority is shielding illegal immigrants from law enforcement, free health care for all, and now trying to run corporate America. The state is mandating that there be a woman in every boardroom.
On Wednesday, lawmakers in the Marxist sanctuary state of California passed a measure mandating at least one woman be placed on the board of every publicly-traded company in the state by the end of next year. Failure to comply with the edict will be punished with a hefty fine — $100,000 for the first offense and $300,000 for subsequent offenses…”
“…The longest-serving Democratic member of the Federal Election Commission, expected to take over as chair in four months, and her top staffer are behind an anti-Trump and anti-GOP crusade, according to a new report from a critic.
In a series of blog posts, the Republican National Lawyers Association questioned the fairness of Commissioner Ellen Weintraub and her counsel, Tom Moore, and compared the attacks on Trump to the bias FBI officials showed to President Trump…”
I left Facebook because they censored me. Facebook is biased against conservative viewpoints. Evidence in media reports indicate this is true beyond doubt.
“…A third of conservatives surveyed have ditched Facebook or are thinking about doing so, according to a poll released Wednesday.
Commissioned by the Media Research Center (MRC), which tracks liberal bias in news coverage, the survey of 1,000 likely voters has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percent and of 5.2 percent for conservatives.
In addition to the 32 percent of self-described conservatives who said they have left or are considering leaving Facebook due to political censorship, 66 percent agreed they do not trust the social media platform, according to the poll.
Another 65 percent of those surveyed said they believe Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are purposely censoring conservatives and conservative voices.
“These numbers are devastating to any CEO responsible for addressing the concerns of his customer base,” Media Research Center President Brent Bozell said in a statement. “According to this survey, 7 percent of conservatives have already left Facebook and another 25 percent are seriously considering it.”…”
“…The U.S. economy grew at a rate of 4.2% in the second quarter — more than the initial estimate of 4.1%, according to the Commerce Department.
Why it matters: The upward revision marks the economy’s best performance in four years, as Reuters reports, thanks to a boost in corporate spending and a decline in imports…”
https://www.axios.com/us-gdp-second-quarter-42-e297c718-bb48-41e9-a59b-6e0b459dfa80.html
What could go wrong?
“…California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill on Tuesday which will eliminate bail for suspects arrested on all but the most violent felonies, reports the Sacramento Bee. Eligible suspects will be let go within 12 hours of booking, according to the new legislation, which can be extended another 12 hours if officials need more time to determine whether suspects should be held for other reasons…”
Jim Brown was a champion as a football player. He is a champion as a man.
South Africa is going authoritarian. Disarming the population is the next step to forcing citizens to follow the government line, or else.
“…Though South Africa witnessed rising levels of economic freedom shortly after Apartheid ended in 1994, the country has taken a more interventionist path to economic development in recent years.
This situation is becoming more pronounced with the South African National Assembly recently voting 241-83 to amend the South African constitution to allow for land expropriation without compensation.
The socialist-leaning African National Congress (ANC) and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) parties are leading the charge for expropriation under the banner of fixing racial disparities that have supposedly remained intact since Apartheid’s conclusion.
While land confiscation has not been officially finalized, South Africans should worry about the direction their country is going…”
And how does gun control fit into this equation?
“…Tuesday brought endless commentary and reporting on how President Trump was being utterly ridiculous and conspiratorial to accuse Google of bias in its search algorithms. Funny: Just over a year ago, in June 2017, the European Union fined the company $2.7 billion for … bias in its search algorithms.
Yes, Trump’s off-the-cuff charge focused on political bias, whereas the EU verdict (after a seven-year investigation) was about the company “systematically favoring” its own Google Shopping feature. But all the Trump-bashers who were suggesting Google would never, ever put its thumb on the scale seem to have ignored at least one elephant in the room.
As we write, the top headlines on Google News include two CNN stories: “Trump slams Google search as ‘rigged’ — but it’s not” and “Debunking Donald Trump’s latest conspiracy theory on Google.” How is the average Web surfer to trust that Google isn’t weighting those stories?
The layman has plenty of reasons to worry about political bias to which the company could be blind: Silicon Valley is a notorious progressive place (except on issues that touch its own interests, anyway), and the internal Google discussion over “dissident” engineer James Damore showed a shocking intolerance for the merest questioning of certain left-liberal pieties.
On the commercial front, Google’s power is obvious: Its algorithms can literally make or break a company — perhaps a whole industry. Google says, “We respectfully disagree with” the EU ruling that it “abused its market dominance,” but that’s not exactly a rebuttal.
We’re no fans of heavy-handed government intervention, but any free democratic society is going to frown on enormous unchecked power. It certainly seems like some kind of independent oversight is called for here…”
https://nypost.com/2018/08/28/we-should-all-be-worried-about-googles-power/
“…GET YOUR GLOBAL WARMING LAW ENFORCEMENT HERE! A new report compiled by the indefatigable Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) exposes a previously secret $50 million fund used to pay for global warming litigation by Democratic state attorneys general and their staffs.
“This is political. We have a policymaking process. They tried it and failed. So their stance is, ‘It’s not working, so we’re going to use law enforcement,’” Horner says in the report, according to LifeZette’s Brendan Kirby.
Horner uncovered, among much else, an email from a staffer to California’s Governor Moonbeam pitching the fund to staffers of the governors of Washington state and New York. The Brown aide wrote “before you gasp, please note that foundations are currently spending over $1 billion a year on climate work.”…”
https://www.lifezette.com/2018/08/new-report-exposes-global-warming-law-enforcement-for-rent/
I believe it is time for the federal government to evaluate regulations on the tech giants.
“…He’d been a talented researcher, an academic, until his friend started a small technology company. He had joined the company and helped it to grow. It eventually became so big that the company had been acquired by one of the tech giants. And so, then, was he.
He was now paid a fortune to help design the algorithms that were central to what the tech giant did. And he had signed solemn legal documents prohibiting him from speaking to me, or to anyone, about his work. But as the years passed, his concern – indeed his guilt – grew. “It’s power without responsibility.” He paused. “There’s so much power, and so little responsibility. This is not notional abstract power. This is real power about day-to-day lives. It’s both material and cultural and financial. The world has to know that this is how it works . . . There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark,” he said, quoting Hamlet a little melodramatically.”…”
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/ridiculously-complicated-algorithms/
More on the Facebook engineer that admits company bias against conservatives and Trump.
“…On Tuesday morning, President Trump lashed out at Google, with his remarks later broadening to include Twitter and Facebook, accusing it of “rigging” search results by presenting only results “from National Left-Wing Media” and accused “Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good.”
Those companies “better be careful because you can’t do that to people,” Trump said later in the Oval Office. “I think that Google, and Twitter and Facebook, they are really treading on very, very troubled territory and they have to be careful. It is not fair to large portions of the population.”
Google immediately responded, condemning Trump’s charge, and claiming that “Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology.”
And yet, as so often happens, in Trump’s crude delivery, the politically incorrect truth was once again be found.
According to a memo posted on Facebook’s internal message board titled “We Have a Problem With Political Diversity”, and which was published by the New York Times, senior Facebook engineer Brian Amerige confirmed Trump’s allegation writing that “we are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views” and shockingly admitted that “we claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology. We throw labels that end in *obe and *ist at each other, attacking each other’s character rather than their ideas.”
The scathing indictment of Facebook’s liberal “mono-culture” continues:
We do this so consistently that employees are afraid to say anything when they disagree with what’s around them politically. HR has told me that this is not a rare concern, and I’ve personally gotten over a hundred messages to that effect. Your colleagues are afraid because they know that they — not their ideas — will be attacked. They know that all the talk of “openness to different perspectives” does not apply to causes of “social justice,” immigration, “diversity”, and “equality.” On this issues, you can either keep quiet or sacrifice your reputation and career.
“These are not fears without cause” Amerige writes, and continues the stunning disclosure of the company’s biased culture, “Because we tear down posters welcoming Trump supporters. We regularly propose removing Thiel from our board because he supported Trump. We’re quick to suggest firing people who turn out to be misunderstood, and even quicker to conclude our colleagues are bigots. We have made “All Lives Matter” a fireable offense. We put Palmer Luckey through a witch hunt because he paid for anti-Hillary ads. We write each other ad-hoc feedback in the PSC tool for having “offensive” ideas. We ask HR to investigate those who dare to criticize Islam’s human rights record for creating a “non inclusive environment.” And they called me a transphobe when I called out our corporate art for being politically radical…”
“…An indepth study of Google search results found that despite the tech giant’s claim to be “a fair and balanced arbiter of facts,” 40 percent more searches produce material that leans politically either to the “left” or the “far left” rather than the “right.”
The researchers for CanIRank concluded Google’s “ranking algorithms aren’t designed to provide a fairly balanced or completely honest representation of controversial issues.”
To assess how fairly search engine results portray political candidates and controversial issues, the study collected more than 1,200 URLs ranking highly in Google.com for politically-charged keywords such as “gun control,” “abortion” and “Black Lives Matter.”
To assess the “political slant,” the researchers used politically active individuals from both the left and right as well as special software.
Along with finding 40 percent of search results are more likely to lean left, 16 percent of political keywords contained no right-leaning pages at all within the first page of results.
The analysis concluded “factors within the Google algorithm itself may make it easier for sites with a left-leaning or centrist viewpoint to rank higher in Google search results compared to sites with a politically conservative viewpoint.”…”
“…Like it or not, social media is the communication form of the future — not just in the U.S., but worldwide. Just Facebook and Twitter combined reach 1.8 billion people. More than two-thirds of all Americans (68 percent) use Facebook. YouTube is pushing out TV as the most popular place to watch video. Google is the No. 1 search engine in both the U.S. and the world.
War is being declared on the conservative movement in this space and conservatives are losing — badly. If the right is silenced, billions of people will be cut off from conservative ideas and conservative media.
It’s the new battleground of media bias. But it’s worse. That bias is not a war of ideas. It’s a war against ideas. It’s a clear effort to censor the conservative worldview from the public conversation…”
It is time for the federal government to evaluate regulation of the social media giants.
“…SAN FRANCISCO — The post went up quietly on Facebook’s internal message board last week. Titled “We Have a Problem With Political Diversity,” it quickly took off inside the social network.
“We are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views,” Brian Amerige, a senior Facebook engineer, wrote in the post, which was obtained by The New York Times. “We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology.”
Since the post went up, more than 100 Facebook employees have joined Mr. Amerige to form an online group called FB’ers for Political Diversity, according to two people who viewed the group’s page and who were not authorized to speak publicly. The aim of the initiative, according to Mr. Amerige’s memo, is to create a space for ideological diversity within the company.
The new group has upset other Facebook employees, who said its online posts were offensive to minorities. One engineer, who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, said several people had lodged complaints with their managers about FB’ers for Political Diversity and were told that it had not broken any company rules.
Another employee said the group appeared to be constructive and inclusive of different political viewpoints. Mr. Amerige did not respond to requests for comment.
The activity is a rare sign of organized dissent within Facebook over the company’s largely liberal workplace culture. While the new group is just a sliver of Facebook’s work force of more than 25,000, the company’s workers have in the past appeared less inclined than their peers at other tech companies to challenge leadership, and most have been loyalists to its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg…”