by John Ward
“Please read the guidance safety very carefully,” suggested Google translate, “as the manufacturer does not comply with instructions”. Novel, but not entirely reassuring.
I was learning to use a cafetière – at last. When I stopped drinking coffee forty years ago, there was Nescafé or Maxwell House in tins of powder. But having had friends and family here last weekend, I decided it was high time I stopped being anti-social, and started providing it for those addicts who crave the stuff.
It’s German (the cafetière, not my family) and as these days I’ve forgotten 90% of the three-foot long nouns of that language, it was necessary to call in Google. “It has to be laid so nobody can stumble over it,” the translation continued. I’m glad Big G told me that; I’m always boiling things on the floor and then having to pay out vast damages because some pissed-witless guest falls over the kettle while backing into the fire.
Google is – let’s be clear about this – an awful, hypocrisy-riddled load of old tosh where the virtue signals are like ground crew waving a bomber into its rightful position. But whenever you try to use its searches for something, or ask it to translate something, or find an ISP it doesn’t like very much, it rapidly becomes abundantly clear that its staff at a senior level are an unmitigated bunch of censorious liars.
The company badly needs regulating on the data sharing thing (reading the mendacity it gives out about this side of its operation is worse than listening to Tony Blair) but above all it needs a serious competitor to kick it up the jacksie – like the pc makers and software providers did with IBM.
Three obvious holes in the offer are there for all to see: the search engine itself lacks discernment and intelligence; the translation service is less than useless; and it has given up on “tell” in favour of “sell”. It is a great big fat lump just waiting to be taken apart by a hungry competitor designed by people with at least a semblance of ethics.
Over at Facebook, meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg is turning into an enigma wrapped in a mystery. While insisting that he does not want to run for President (he’s a Democrat, large ‘D’) Marky keeps on doing exactly what you’d expect a wannabe President to do: making public statements about government priorities, hiring pollsters to check out his popularity by State, and virtue-signalling bigtime about obsessive Democrat issues like Trump “being racist”, Trump “colluding with Russia to get elected” and “Black Lives Matter”.
However, the website Wired just ran a piece about Mr Z’s darker side….and the billionaire doesn’t come out of it too well. The dictatorial tendencies one would sort of expect, but the censorious nature of Facebook did surprise me a little. Wired reported how ex employees confirmed “we routinely suppressed conservative news”, using ‘a bunch of biased curators’ to upweight liberal stories and block anything pro-Trump.
There have long been rumours of Facebook members invented by Zuckerberg’s staff to push fake anti-Trump news – especially in relation to Trump and Russian collusion. Last weekend, the Washington Examiner rubbished the Trump Russian connection (it’s a very right-wing paper, but I think they have this one spot on) and brought forward evidence – as opposed to innuendo – to show that Zuckers is an enthusiastic censor of anti-Putin news in Russia, bowing and scraping to every demand made.
I keep seeing articles across the spectrum of US opinion saying either that Zuckerberg genuinely has no interest in the White House, or that a social media owner running for President “simply wouldn’t be allowed”. But while it is true to say that MZ winning for the Democrats would be a bit like Murdoch becoming King of the UK, there is nothing to stop any media owner getting on the ticket.
It was, let’s face it, only a matter of time before something like this happened. The days of log cabin to White House are long, long gone. The last one was Jimmy Carter, and the Alt State destroyed him in a single term….including collusion with the Iranians to ensure no release of the hostages until after the Carter v Reagan election.
I do wish the conspiracists would stop calling it ‘The Deep State’. It’s above ground and running, for crying out loud: it is a complementary or, as I prefer to call it, Alternative State. We are now very close to all major Western States being unelected States using indirect faux-democracy to represent the interests of what Eisenhower called “the military industrial complex”….but what is, in 2018 America, a pentangle of globalism, banking, the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department.
Could I just take this opportunity please to thank the hundreds of Sloggers who wished me well on reaching the milestone of Seventy.
Sadly, the event seems to have distracted a lot of folks from reading this very important piece about precisely why the Dow Index is so high. You don’t need a degree in Wall Street to understand it: it is such a breathtakingly simple scam, one wonders why it never surfaced before.