Here’s a heart-warming, feel good story about a bunch of Greenpeace hippies that thought it was a swell idea to land on a United States Navy submarine, and the submariners who quickly taught them the errors of their ways.
I’m not going to excerpt this, because it’s reasonably short, and the way it unfolds is a lot of fun…
As when Elon Musk dismantled the censorship apparatus at Twitter, leftists are bemoaning Meta/Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg ending “fact checking” at Facebook as though it was the end of some sort of golden age. What they are actually bemoaning is that they will no longer be able to suppress political opinions they disagree with.
Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan to spell out just how the Biden Administration’s censorship regime worked.
I don’t necessarily trust Zuckerberg’s assertions that Facebook’s original intentions were pure as the driven snow when he started putting fact checkers in place (and that’s one reason I’m not editing out things like “um,” “like,” and “you knows,” as these may be verbal tells when he’s glossing over or eliding information rather than just verbal throat clearing), but I think his depiction of how government pressure for censorship came down is probably accurate.
Should we trust Zuckerberg? To quote Omar Little from The Wire, “I trust his fear.” As I noted in Friday’s LinkSwarm, the MAGA winds must be blowing very strong indeed for Zuckerberg to flip so quickly and completely. Zuckerberg probably had misgivings while these things were going on, but unlike Musk, would never have voiced them so openly had Trump not won.
Also, as Tim Pool noted, “Facebook built a portal for Feds to log into their system to flag ‘misinformation.’ For more than a decade, the federal government, the FBI, the CIA, I think the NSA, had backdoor access to Facebook as well as other companies.”
Time for an update to this old classic
The Jim Jordan report Zuckerberg references is the final committee report on the weaponization of the American government to censor opposing political viewpoints. The report is not only hard to find online (it’s not in the first page of Google results), it is so large (17,014 pages) that it seems to be literally unreadabe in Firefox, as whatever Acrobat window thing they have wants to jump back when you scroll to the second page. As a partial remedy, I have (with a bit of difficulty) captured the introduction and posted it here, though the paragraph breaks may not be exact.
The founding documents of the United States articulate the ideals of the American republic and guarantee to all American citizens fundamental rights and liberties. For too long, however, the American people have faced a two-tiered system of government—one of favorable treatment for the politically-favored class, and one of intimidation and unfairness for the rest of American citizens. Under the Biden-Harris Administration, the contrast between these two tiers has become even more stark.
To stand up for the American people, the House of Representatives authorized the creation of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government within the Committee on the Judiciary. During the 118th Congress, the Select Subcommittee worked to “bring abuses by the Federal Government into the light for the American people and ensure that Congress, as their elected representatives, can take appropriate action to remedy them.”2 The mission of the Select Subcommittee has been to protect and strengthen the fundamental rights of the American people.
By investigating, uncovering, and documenting executive branch misconduct, the Select Subcommittee has taken important steps to ensure that the federal government no longer works against the American people. This work is not complete, but it is a necessary first step to stop the weaponization of the federal government. From its inception, the Select Subcommittee sought to protect free speech and expand upon the constitutional protections of the First Amendment. Throughout the Biden-Harris Administration, multiple federal agencies, including the White House, have engaged in a vast censorship campaign against so-called mis-, dis-, or malinformation.
The Select Subcommittee revealed the extent of the “censorship-industrial complex,” detailing how the federal government and law enforcement coordinated with academics, nonprofits, and other private entities to censor speech online. The Select Subcommittee also revealed how the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Election Integrity Partnership—created “at the request of” the Department of Homeland Security3—urged Big Tech to censor Americans online.
The Select Subcommittee’s oversight has had a real effect in expanding the First Amendment. In a Supreme Court dissent, three justices noted how the Select Subcommittee’s investigation revealed “that valuable speech was . . . suppressed.”4 In a letter to the Committee and Select Subcommittee, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the Biden-Harris Administration “pressured” Facebook to censor Americans.5 Facebook gave in to this pressure, demoting posts and content that was highly relevant to political discourse in the United States. In response to the Select Subcommittee’s oversight, universities and other groups shut down their “disinformation” research and federal agencies slowed their communications with Big Tech.
Pursuant to its mission, the Select Subcommittee also examined the weaponization of federal law-enforcement resources. Many FBI whistleblowers have disclosed to the Select Subcommittee examples of waste, fraud, and abuse at the FBI. When these whistleblowers came forward, the Bureau brutally retaliated against many of them for breaking ranks—suspending them without pay, preventing them for seeking outside employment, and even purging suspected disloyal employees. Through its oversight, the Select Subcommittee revealed how the FBI abused its security clearance adjudication process to target whistleblowers, with the FBI even admitting its error and reinstating the security clearance of one decorated FBI employee.
The Select Subcommittee also investigated the executive branch’s actions in intruding on and interfering with Americans’ constitutionally protected activity. The Select Subcommittee revealed and stopped the FBI’s effort to target Catholic Americans because of their religious views, detailed the Justice Department’s directives to target parents at school board meetings, stopped the Internal Revenue Service from making unannounced visits to American taxpayers’ homes, caused the Justice Department to change its internal policies to respect the separation of powers and limit subpoenas for Legislative Branch employees, and highlighted the vast warrantless financial surveillance of Americans by federal law enforcement.
The Select Subcommittee has examined the federal government’s efforts to interfere in our elections, highlighting the FBI’s fervent efforts to “prebunk” a story about the Biden family’s influence peddling scheme in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. The Select Subcommittee’s work also demonstrated how the Biden campaign colluded with the intelligence community to falsely discredit this story as “Russian disinformation.”
This report accumulates and presents the findings of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government during the 118th Congress. The federal government must work for all Americans, not just the favored few. As the country moves forward from the disastrous policies of the Biden-Harris Administration, it is important that policymakers ensure that the federal government can no longer be weaponized against American citizens. “Freedom is fragile thing,” Ronald Reagan warned in 1967, “it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people.”6 The Select Subcommittee’s work in the 118th Congress has been a start to a long and difficult process to better protect Americans’ fundamental freedoms. But our work is not the end. More must be done to ensure that our fundamental liberties and cherished rights continue for Americans to come.
1 THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE para.
2 (U.S. 1776). 2169 CONG. REC. H130 (daily ed. Jan. 10, 2023) (statement of Rep. Tom Cole).
3 STAFF OF SELECT SUBCOMM. ON THE WEAPONIZATION OF THE FED. GOV’T OF THE H. COMM. ON THE JUDICIARY, 118TH CONG., THE WEAPONIZATION OF ‘DISINFORMATION’ PSEUDO-EXPERTS AND BUREAUCRATS: HOW THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PARTNERED WITH UNIVERSITIES TO CENSOR AMERICANS’ POLITICAL SPEECH (Comm. Print Nov. 6, 2023) [hereinafter “NOV. 6 REPORT”].
4 Murthy v. Missouri, 603 U.S. 43, 78 (2024) (Alito, J., dissenting).
5 Letter from Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Exec. Officer, Meta, to Rep. Jim Jordan, Chairman, H. Comm. on the Judiciary (Aug. 26, 2024).
6 Governor Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address (Jan. 5, 1967).
And remember this was all part of a coordinated international censorship regime. The recently shut down Center for Global Engagement, started under Obama, was a a key proponent of this censorship regime.
When lefties bemoan the change in Facebook, this is what they’re lamenting: The ability to censor the free speech of fellow Americans under the direct mandate of federal government agencies working on behalf of the Democrat Party to suppress the speech of their ideological opponents.
Video game YouTuber Asmongold documents some interesting behavior in the new video game Marvel Rivals: It censors your text messages if you try to say anything critical of Communist China.
Marvel Rivals is a “third person hero shooter” that’s just been released featuring Marvel characters. Unusually in a year in which AAA video game titles lost the companies releasing them big money due to gamers rejecting them for being woke, Marvel Rivals has garnered generally good reviews.
Like many games, it has a chat system. But testing other reports on the game, Asmongold verified that it will not let you post such messages as:
It flags all these as “text contains inappropriate content.”
I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that Marvel Rivals was developed and published by Chinese developer NetEase Games for Marvel Games.
Remember, when you subcontract IP development to China, you’re importing censorship…
We’ve previously covered that China’s demographics are in severe decline and that China’s GDP may be overstated by 60%. Now a researcher says that China’s population could be overstated by 37-50%.
(Before we dig in, two caveats: First, the channel is Lei’s Real Talk, from someone who came over from communist China and was a student in the U.S. during the Tiananmen Square crackdown, but she doesn’t use her full name, which she says is to protect her family back in China. Second, she’s using AI to answer some of her questions. Still, the math-based questions don’t seem conducive to the “AI hallucinations” we see elsewhere, but some caveat lictor seems in order.)
Given the GDP overstatement estimates, this enormous overstatement of China’s population seems plausible. It also makes all those wild claims of “China will soon overtake the US economically” look even more ridiculous.
China’s “one child per couple” policy will be seen by future generations as one of the greatest self-inflicted catastrophes in history.
I’ve previously talked about China’s difficulties in catching up to the west in semiconductor manufacturing here, here, and here, among other places. To summarize: Western nations have an advanced, highly interconnected semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem that China doesn’t have the technical expertise to replicate. In particular, China has nothing like ASML’s extreme ultraviolet lithography machines (AKA a “stepper”) necessary to build the most advanced chips with the smallest feature geometries.
Here’s a piece with ASML’s CEO talking about just how far China is behind.
Though advancements that SMIC and Huawei have made in the semiconductor sector in recent years are pretty impressive, the companies are 10 to 15 years behind industry giants like Intel, TSMC, and Samsung, said Christophe Fouquet, chief executive of toolmaker ASML. It’s well known that even with the best-in-class DUV tools, Chinese fab SMIC will be unable to match TSMC’s process technologies cost-effectively. This is because Chinese companies cannot access leading-edge EUV lithography tools.
“By banning the export of EUV, China will lag 10 to 15 years behind the West,” said Christophe Fouquet in an interview with NRC (machine translated). “That really has an effect.”
ASML has never shipped its EUV tools to China due to the Wassenaar Arrangement, despite SMIC’s reported order for one EUV machine. The details remain unclear, but ASML did not deliver the machine to the Chinese foundry due to US sanctions. However, ASML kept shipping advanced DUV lithography tools, such as the Twinscan NXT:2000i, which are capable of producing chips on 5nm and 7nm-class process technologies.
As a result, SMIC has been producing chips for Huawei using its 1st-generation and 2nd-generation 7nm-class process technology for years now. This has certainly helped the Chinese high-tech giants weather U.S. government sanctions.
Having understood that EUV tools are not coming to China, Huawei and its partners have explored extreme ultraviolet lithography themselves with the aim of building their own lithography chipmaking tools and ecosystem, which will take 10 – 15 years at best. For reference, it has taken over 20 years for ASML and its partners from foundational work to complete commercial machines to build the EUV ecosystem.
China thought it had found a way out of the western ban on high end lithography machines. Turns out: Not so much.
When you buy a piece of high-end semiconductor equipment, you’re not just buying the machine, you’re buying the knowledgebase of deep technical expertise of both the on-site technical staff, as well as the process wizards back in Eindhoven, Santa Clara and Tokyo. There are inumerable parameters that need to be just right, and you need to know how to tweak them if the yield goes south. Without that expertise to guide you, the high end machines quickly become worthless.
I can imagine President Trump offering China a grand bargain, in which they stop stealing western technology, stop committing genocide against the Uighers, stop clashing with Philippine ships in the South China Sea, meet its treaty obligations regarding Hong Kong, and let international agencies inspects its high level bioweapon labs in exchange for easing semiconductor sanctions.
I doubt China would take such a deal, as it would be too humiliating for Xi to stand. But I can imagine Trump making it…
As is the now annual tradition, enjoy Stellarscope’s version of “Silent Night”:
Merry Christmas!
Been a while since we did some gun geeking, so here’s Ian McCollum doing a Forgotten Weapons video on all the ways you can screw up while trying to make a new pistol.
There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip…
More than two years into Putin’s three day Special Operation, Russia is starting to show extensive cracks in its facade of normalcy.
Russian lawmakers have proposed introducing food ration cards across the entire country in response to rising prices, claiming the idea has a “healthy foundation”, the Moscow Times wrote on Dec. 15.
Anatoly Aksakov, head of the State Duma’s Committee on Financial Markets, endorsed the idea of reintroducing food vouchers reminiscent of those used in the Soviet Union – the proposal, initially suggested by the Russia’s Kaliningrad Oblast governor.
Aksakov believes the initiative should be expanded nationwide. The Russian official stated that food vouchers would help “support socially vulnerable groups,” though he did not specify a potential monthly allowance for these cards.
“As of Dec. 9, the Russian Ministry of Economic Development reported annual inflation reaching 9.2%, the highest level since February 2023. However, alternative metrics indicate significantly higher figures,” the publication noted.
Food ration cards in Kaliningrad Oblast are set to roll out in 2025, targeting pensioners with incomes below the subsistence minimum.
On Dec. 10, it was reported that the Kremlin had significantly increased military spending amid a catastrophic collapse of the ruble. The Russian government has allocated unprecedented funds for the war against Ukraine.
For 2025, Russia’s budget includes a 25% increase in military spending, bringing it to 13.49 trillion rubles ($175.37 billion). Military expenditures will account for 32.5% of the budget, an unprecedented level since the Soviet era. By comparison, during the first year of the war against Ukraine, the government spent 17% of its budget on the military. In 2023, this figure rose to 19%, and the 2024 year’s allocation stands at 29.5%.
—is the collapse of Assad’s Syria, an important client state for Russia:
Russia is in a pickle getting its men and equipment home, because it can’t overfly nations hostile to it (most of them), it can’t sail ships home through the Bosporus (Montreux Convention), and it probably can’t get them all the way home up to its Baltic ports because it can’t refuel and resupply at hostile NATO ports (I wonder if a combination of Mediterranean African ports and at-sea resupply could get the job done). Plus Russia has been resupplying its mercenary army supporting Africa’s League of Assholes (Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso) from Syria, and Assad’s fall puts the entire operation in jeopardy.
The stresses on Russia are only going to get worse moving forward. For all the talk that Trump is going to bail Russia out, Volodymyr Zelenskyy evidently doesn’t think so. Plus one of Trump’s key negotiating tactics is to threaten whatever the other party holds most dear to force them to agree to a deal. And given Russia’s numerous manifest weaknesses, Trump is going to go into talks with an awful lot of leverage points…