“A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.” — George Orwell
The White House admits Joe Biden was lying when he suggested that his uncle was eaten by cannibals in New Guinea during WW2. Wow, I thought this was a true story. Karine Jean-Pierre tried deflecting by saying Biden was simply just expressing how “incredibly proud” he was of his uncle before admitting the story was false. “You saw the president, he was incredibly proud of his uncle’s service in uniform.” Jean-Pierre then admitted that his uncle Ambrose Finnegan died by crashing into the Pacific. “You saw him respond to all of you when asked about the moment yesterday and his uncle who lost his life when the military aircraft he was on crashed in the Pacific after taking off near New Guinea.”
I’ve never heard of “expressing you’re proud” of a relative by claiming they were eaten by cannibals. What about Corn Pop…is that story made up too?
House Democrats finally found a nation’s flag they believe is worth waiving. Not yours…Ukraine’s dummy. Instead of outlining a long-term plan for addressing the war in Ukraine, we’re hastily throwing billions of taxpayer dollars at a problem without a clear solution or exit strategy.
Google Fires Pro-Palestinian Protestors
Google’s dismissal of 28 protesting employees on Wednesday has exposed the tech giant’s evolution from its idealistic origins into a more conventional company, a significant shift from its initial pledges. Silicon Valley’s leading firms, including Google, have long encouraged talented employees to regard the office as a campus, where they could “bring their whole selves” to work and change the world for the better. However, workers who bought into those promises are now facing a moment of truth.
The 28 firings came in the wake of sit-in protests on Tuesday at Google offices in Silicon Valley and New York City. The demonstrators opposed a $1.2 billion 2021 Google Cloud contract with the Israeli government, contending that Google’s support for the effort — known as Project Nimbus — was harming Palestinians in Gaza. Nine employees were arrested during the sit-ins.
In a note to employees, CEO Sundar Pichai wrote, “This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.” Google also stated that the Project Nimbus contract is “not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”
Google, from its early days, prided itself on creating a university-like atmosphere for the elite engineers it hired. Dissent was encouraged in the belief that open discourse fostered innovation. “A lot of Google is organized around the fact that people still think they’re in college when they work here,” then-CEO Eric Schmidt told “In the Plex” author Steven Levy in the 2000s. However, what worked for an organization with a few thousand employees is harder to maintain among nearly 200,000 workers. Generational shifts in political and social expectations also mean that Google’s leadership and its rank-and-file aren’t always aligned.
Google has already faced several waves of employee protest over its programs. In 2018, thousands of Google workers protested its participation in a Defense Department effort called Project Maven that attempted to apply AI to the Pentagon’s image-recognition needs. Some employees quit, arguing that their research should not be used to help target drones. The company has also previously undertaken high-profile firings or quasi-firings, like those of AI researchers Margaret Mitchell and Timnit Gebru. (Google maintains Gebru resigned.) With this week’s dismissals, the company made it clear that it views the current protests not as a form of intellectual disagreement but as a matter of rules enforcement and security.
Social media posts and reports of the debate on internal Google message boards show a deep split in thinking on the firings. One group of observers — often older or more conservative in perspective, and including many business leaders or investors — applauds Google, saying the protesters got what they deserved and were deluded for thinking that the workplace was an appropriate forum for political action. Another group — often younger, more progressive and more friendly to labor — sees the protests as an act of conscience and the firings as a betrayal of Google’s founding values.
It’s a Vindman Thing – Eugene Vindman, who already has been accused of being a carpetbagger, posed with a Confederate-era Virginia flag over the weekend, was forced to apologize… then bizarrely called for Virginia to change its state flag. Somehow his “apology” made both Democrats and Republicans even more upset.
Vindman was attacked by local legislators and his primary opponents, who said it was “disheartening” and “ignorant” and even called him “out of state grifter.”
“Eugene Vindman isn’t ready for primetime. Should Vindman somehow squeak out of the primary, Republicans are ready to pounce on him and flip this seat in November.” — NRCC Spokeswoman Delanie Bomar