RUTHFULLY YOURS

When Left and Right finally agree on something, watch out: The unthinkable becomes normal.

So it is with changing attitudes toward Silicon Valley.

For the last two decades, Apple, Google, Amazon, and other West Coast tech corporations have been untouchable icons. They piled up astronomical profits while hypnotizing both left-wing and right-wing politicians.

Conservative administrations praised them as modern versions of 19th-century risk-takers such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Bill Gates, the late Steve Jobs, and other tech giants were seen as supposedly creating national wealth in an unregulated, laissez-faire landscape that they had invented from nothing.

At a time when American companies were increasingly unable to compete in the rough-and-tumble world arena, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook bulldozed their international competition. Indeed, they turned high-tech and social media into American brands.

The Left was even more enthralled. It dropped its customary regulatory zeal, despite Silicon Valley’s monopolizing, outsourcing, offshoring, censoring, and destroying of startup competition. After all, Big Tech was left-wing and generous. High-tech interests gave hundreds of millions of dollars to left-wing candidates, think tanks, and causes.

Companies such as Facebook and Google were able to warp their own social-media protocols and Internet searches to insidiously favor progressive agendas and messaging.

If the Left feared that the tech billionaires were becoming robber barons, they also delighted in the fact that they were at least left-wing robber barons.

Unlike the steel, oil, and coal monopolies of the 19th century that out of grime and smoke created the sinews of a growing America, Silicon Valley gave us shiny, clean, green, and fun pods, pads, and phones.

As a result, social media, Internet searches, texts, email, and other computer communications were exempt from interstate regulatory oversight. Big Tech certainly was not subject to the rules that governed railroads, power companies, trucking industries, Wall Street, and television and radio.

But attitudes about hip high-tech corporations have now changed on both the left and right.

Liberals are under pressure from their progressive base to make Silicon Valley hire more minorities and women.

Progressives wonder why West Coast techies cannot unionize and sit down for tough bargaining with their progressive billionaire bosses.

Local community groups resent the tech giants driving up housing prices and zoning out the poor from cities such as Seattle and San Francisco.

Behind the veneer of a cool Apple logo or multicolored Google trademark are scores of multimillionaires who live one-percenter lifestyles quite at odds with the soft socialism espoused by their corporate megaphones.

Conservatives got sick of Silicon Valley, too.

The Democrat’s Trump/Russia collusion narrative took a major hit this week when Facebook leaks about Russia-linked ads forced disappointed Dems to walk back their anti-Trump messaging. Congressional leaders, in the meantime, have reportedly renewed their focus on team Obama’s election year political espionage.

The anti-Trumpers had a promising story-line — “Trump and Russia colluded on Facebook” — that had to be downgraded to merely “Russia sought to create incivility and chaos” when it was discovered that the Russia-linked group in question promoted issues and groups on both sides of the political spectrum.

According to Facebook’s investigators, the company sold up to $150,000 worth of ads to a Russian government-affiliated troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency which bought the ads through hundreds of phony Facebook pages and accounts.

The intelligence community describes the Internet Research Agency as “a state-funded organization that blogs and tweets on behalf of the Kremlin.”

At least one of the over 3,000 Russia-bought ads, which Facebook will soon turn over to Congress, promoted Black Lives Matter and specifically targeted audiences in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, CNN reported, Wednesday.

The Black Lives Matter ad appeared on Facebook at some point in late 2015 or early 2016, the sources said. The sources said it appears the ad was meant to appear both as supporting Black Lives Matter but also could be seen as portraying the group as threatening to some residents of Baltimore and Ferguson.

New descriptions of the Russian-bought ads shared with CNN suggest that the apparent goal of the Russian buyers was to amplify political discord and fuel an atmosphere of incivility and chaos, though not necessarily to promote one candidate or cause over another. Facebook’s review of Russian efforts on its platform focused on a timeframe from June 2015 to May 2017.

These ranged from posts promoting Black Lives Matter to posts promoting gun rights and the Second Amendment to posts warning about what they said was the threat undocumented immigrants posed to American democracy. Beyond the election, Russians have sought to raise questions about western democracies.

According to the Washington Post, other ads showed support for Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton among Muslim women.

“This is consistent with the overall goal of creating discord inside the body politic here in the United States, and really across the West,” said Steve Hall, a former CIA officer and CNN National Security Analyst. “It shows they the level of sophistication of their targeting. They are able to sow discord in a very granular nature, target certain communities and link them up with certain issues.”

Republican Sen. Richard Burr, the chairman of the committee, said Tuesday that there’s “no evidence yet” that Russians and Trump officials colluded on the Facebook ads, but said “it’s an area the committee continues to investigate.”

While the Trump/Russia collusion investigation ran into a speed bump, this week, the unmasking probe gained steam.

Congressional republicans have turned their attention to team Obama’s efforts to obtain highly classified intelligence information on Trump and his allies before the inauguration.

U.S officials familiar with the situation told the Washington Free Beacon that Obama administration National Security Adviser Susan Rice’s recent testimony before the House Intelligence Committee “place renewed attention on the investigation” into why highly classified intelligence community reports were obtained and then leaked to the press.

Congressional leaders are also reportedly interested in finding out why former United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power and other senior Obama officials made an unusually high number of unmasking requests during the final months of the Obama administration.

“It was understood in the Bush administration that unmasking was out of the ordinary; it was something rare that you might sometimes do but needed a special and easily defensible reason for doing,” said a former official who served in several Republican administrations. “You could not ask out of mere curiosity, nor obviously for political reasons. There needed to be a clear, direct national security justification.” CONTINUE AT SITE

President Trump might not be winning when it comes to shuffling legislation through Congress, but the same cannot be said when it comes to regulatory rollback.

On the latter matter, his actions set a historic precedent. That is likely good for the economy and may help explain the surging stock market.

“There’s a massive movement on regulations in the first few months of Trump,” says David Ranson, director of research at HCWE & Co.

How massive? As Mr. Trump might say, it’s Bigly.

In the first place, the administration isn’t producing a ton of new regulations.

“By virtually any measure, dating back through two Democratic presidents and one Republican president, the lack of regulatory output is historic,” states a recent study by the American Action Forum, a right-leaning think tank.

“Actual output was just 8 percent of the historical average,” AAF says.

The study looked at data on regulations from 1994 through 2017, specifically focusing on the period Jan. 23 to May 23 during each year.

Better still, the White House team have been busy nixing regulations.

Under the Trump administration, 64 percent of reviews by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs “have resulted in withdrawn rules,” which compares with withdrawal rates of 25 percent in 2009 and 55 percent in 2001, the report says. Both 2001 and 2009 were the first years of the prior two administrations.

Perhaps the biggest achievement of all is that the cost of introduced regulations was a fraction of those in past periods. This time the AAF reviewed data for the years 2005 through 2017.

“There have been $4.2 billion in regulatory costs since January 23, 2017,” the report states. “The 2005 to 2017 average is $26 billion.” Figures include the costs of independent agencies.

Or put another way, costs imposed by the administration are running at just 16 percent of the historical norm.

“Across the board, the results indicate a significant diminution in the number of regulations approved and a notable uptick in the number of withdrawn measures (previous rules from the Obama Administration no longer under consideration),” the report reads.

So what?

The fact that the administration is rolling back regulations in this way is good for the economy.

“My impression is that heavy regulation might slow growth and it certainly increases costs,” says Dr. Ivo Pezzuto, professor of global economics at ISM Business School in Paris.

Put another way, when regulation gets rolled back then business costs fall, profits rise, and growth can accelerate. At least that is the theory.

Statistical analysis shows this to be true as well. CONTINUE AT SITE

Just two or three generations ago, most Americans understood that George Orwell’s classics Animal Farm and 1984 were written to explain how freedom is lost to totalitarianism and the intolerance that accompanies it. “Big Brother,” a term that many people still casually use to describe an all-knowing governing authority, comes right out of 1984. In the society that Orwell describes, all citizens are continually reminded that “Big Brother is watching you,” by way of a constant surveillance through the pervasive use of “telescreens” by the ruling class.

Orwell’s warnings about totalitarianism written in novel form in Animal Farm and 1984 came shortly after Freidrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom was published at the end of World War II. But it took the shocking revelations from books on Nazism and Soviet Communism, by scholars like William Shirer and Robert Conquest in the 1960s, to really make Orwell relevant for teaching to the masses educated in American public schools. And it was not just an academic exercise insofar as Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, was at that time brutally crushing all resistance, enforcing the Soviet model of totalitarian control on East European countries that became satellite states of Moscow.

Reading Orwell, it was thought, would help American students appreciate their freedoms and gain perspective and critical faculties so as to understand socialist totalitarianism and its defining features: 1) the institutionalization of propaganda designed to warp and destroy people’s grasp on reality, and 2) the fostering of group think, conformity and collectivism designed to eliminate critical and independent thinking. By making the press subservient to the state, these two features would prevent the rise of an opposition movement or party and protect and perpetuate one party control.

Orwell described the scope of the totalitarian enterprise, noting in one section of 1984 that “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, and every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

The concepts of “newspeak” and “doublethink” in Orwell’s 1984 are fully manifest in what we now experience as political correctness. Newspeak is the distorted reality accomplished by manipulating the meaning of language and words, while double think is the conditioned mental attitude to ignore reality and common sense and substitute and embrace a distorted or false narrative to the exclusion of other views. As Orwell notes, “the whole aim of Newspeak and Doublethink is to narrow the range of thought.” This is the goal of political correctness, and it explains why its adherents tend to be so intolerant—shutting down speech from the politically incorrect on college campuses across the county, demanding that historic statues and monuments associated with the Confederacy be taken down, and demanding that people with opposing views on such subjects as climate change and gay marriage be silenced, fined or arrested.

Many assume there is a long way to go before the American government has the power of Orwell’s Big Brother. After all, the thinking goes, the press in the U.S. is not controlled by the government so Americans cannot be so easily brainwashed as they theoretically would be through state-controlled propaganda.

But what if the universities and the educational system and the major television and print media institutions embrace the groupthink that ingratiates them with the ruling elite? What if the culture shapers in Hollywood and the advertising industry on Madison Avenue follow a similar path in participating in and reinforcing the same groupthink norms?

The Hollywood faithful turned out with all their finery to reward one another with self-reverential awards called Emmys. As the public now knows this event turned into a verbal auto de fe of President Trump.

That, of course, isn’t surprising. The anti-Trump vulgarity of Steven Colbert has already been on display before. But what always surprises me is the level of ignorance.

Last week the Hollywood Left was raising money to combat Global Warming. How these well meaning dupes intend to do so isn’t clear. Will DiCaprio give up his private plane? Stevie Wonder said if you don’t agree with these suppositions you either don’t care or you are dumb. This hardly seems like the right way to secure adherents.

But the celebrity who got my attention is Beyoncé. This self-appointed queen of pop said Global Warming, about which the Trump administration is presumably indifferent, causes earthquakes. Now this is a scientific breakthrough. Up until this “revelation” I assumed earthquakes were related to seismic waves that make the ground shake. When plates rub against each other they stick, the rocks break and earthquakes occur. However, I have been deceived; earthquakes develop from CO2 cast into the atmosphere. There is simply no telling where these scientific ideas will lead.

Now in order to be a star of the first magnitude, you have to have a cause. It must be bigger than the self. If it evokes tears, all the better. You might start in Africa, a continent in need of all kinds of aid. Angelina Jolie shows up there routinely as does Madonna. If I take off my cynical judgment, it is possible some of the Hollywood glitterati actually perform good deeds.

Nonetheless, it is best to maintain a wary eye where these devotees of good deeds are concerned. I make this claim because good intentions often foster bad results; in part because so many of these stars know so little. It is instructive that Sean Penn, a high school dropout, has arrogated to himself the role of environmental moralizer.

As I see it, the time has come for these folks to get over themselves. Rather than spend time telling me and others how to live our lives, they would be better off making good films. By the way, there are very few good films that are made as reduced Hollywood profits attest. The producers of the Emmys might also take notice of the fact this recent fiasco of Trump-bashing led to the worst rating for any of these shows. Don’t these people realize the U.S. has Trump supporters? America isn’t Hollywood, even if George Clooney, among others, doesn’t know that.